a house of our own
we'll have framed copies of Barbara Freitchie hanging all over the place
if you want them."

To Stuart Farquaharson just then the future seemed very sure. He had no
way of knowing that after to-morrow years lay between the present and
their next meeting--and that after that--but of course he could not read
the stars.

CHAPTER III

The sand bar rose like a white island beyond the mild surf of the shore,
distant enough to make it a reservation for those hardier swimmers who
failed to find contentment between beach and float. Outside the bar the
surf boiled in spume-crowned, and went out again sullenly howling an
in-sucking of sands and an insidious tug of undertow.

One head only bobbed far out as a single swimmer shaped his course in
unhurried strokes toward the bar. This swimmer had come alone from the
hotel bath-houses and had strolled down into the streaming bubbles of an
outgoing wave without halting to inspect the other bathers. There was a
businesslike directness in the way he kept onward and outward until a
comber lifted him and his swimming had begun.

The young man might have been between twenty and twenty-five and a Greek
feeling for line and form and rhythmic strength would have called his
body beautiful. Its flesh was smooth and brown, flowing in frictionless
ease over muscles that escaped bulkiness; its shoulders swung with a
sort of gladiatorial freedom. But the Hellenic sculptor would have found
the head suited to his use as well as the torso and limbs, for it was a
head well shaped and well carried, dominated by eyes alert with
intelligence, and enlivened with humor.

As he rocked between crest and trough, the swimmer's glance caught the
shattered form of a breaker at the end of the bar. He liked things to be
the biggest of their sort. If there was to be surf, he wanted it to be
like that beyond, with a fierce song in its breaking and the foam of the
sea's endless sweat in its lashings.

When at last he let himself down and his feet touched bottom, he wiped
the brine out of his eyes and hurried up the shallow rise--then halted
suddenly. The bar had appeared empty of human life, but now he caught a
glimpse of a head and a pair of shoulders and they were feminine. A
normal curiosity as to further particulars asserted itself. He had a
distinct feeling of apprehension lest the face, when seen, should prove
a disappointment, because unless it was singularly attractive--more