ckey intent on winning a race. On deck the crew
wondered what had got into the old man, as they called him, for all his
twenty-eight years.

"Before, he was a sailor," the isles crew complained. "Is he now a
merchant at last? _A Righ is truagh!_ O King, the pity!"

But it was not interest in cargoes that compelled him; it was the
thought of a face like the wing of a bird, ready to soar. The dark,
gracious face, with the eyes where emotion swirled like a mill-race, the
parted ruddy lips-_La Mielleuse_--mouth of honey. And the word he must
not say aloud, like some occult word of magic until a certain moment
should come:

"Claire-Anne!" Just "Claire-Anne!"

Before he had left Marseilles he had not been able to think of her, to
weigh what happened, to understand. Things were too close. But at sea,
and in the dusk of the Antrim glen, and in Belfast and Liverpool, he had
had time to view the incident in perspective; to stand aside, as one
stands back from a picture, and appreciate the color, the line, the
truth; to see that that rich purple, that splash of orange, that
rippling, rich silver-gray are not spots like flowers, but a definite
design....

In Antrim he had remembered Dancing Town, the vision of Fiddlers' Green.
Fourteen years before!

And now that he remembered, it seemed to him foolish not to have known
he was sailing somewhere. He was always sailing.... And unexpectedly,
after he had given up all hope, under his lee bow had risen suddenly
Fiddlers' Green.... Once before he thought he had made port there, but
that only made this island the true one.... For there were always two
things, and the second was right.... False dawn and dawn; the False Cape
and Cape Horn; the Southern Crosses, the false and true....

And he would tell her this, when he met her again, of how he had been
thinking, and discovered her to be the true life....

The wife he had married and buried seven years before he thought of now;
she was the second woman he had known, his mother the first. And from
the cold precipice of his mother he had fled into the flinty fields of
Moyra Dolan.... He felt a little sorry for the boy he was seven years
before--so young, so gallant, so wrong.... He had thought that all there
was in life was a home to return to, a wife, children.... He had wanted
an acre of land in the sun, where all the world was his. When one was
young, one knew so little.... Wisdom came with the lapping of the waves,
and years of