face, brown hair, blue eyes and cream-like skin. She
was touched by a rose on each cheek and made womanly by firm and yet
generous breasts, tenderly imprisoned by the white chiffon of her blouse
in which was one bright sprig of the buds of a cherry-tree-a touch of
modest luxuriance on a person sparsely ornamented. It was not tropical,
this picture of Sheila Llyn; it was a flick of northern life in a summer
sky. It was at once cheerful and apart. It had no August in it; no oil
and wine. It was the little twig that grew by a running spring. It
was fresh, dominant and serene. It was Connemara on the Amazon! It was
Sheila herself, whom time had enriched with far more than years and
experience. It was a personality which would anywhere have taken place
and held it. It was undefeatable, persistent and permanent; it was the
spirit of Ireland loose in a world that was as far apart from Ireland as
she was from her dead, dishonoured father.

And Dyck? At first she felt she must fly to him--yes, in spite of the
fact that he had suffered prison for manslaughter. But a nearer look at
him stopped the impulse at its birth. Here was the Dyck Calhoun she had
known in days gone by, but not the Dyck she had looked to see; for this
man was like one who had come from a hanging, who had seen his dearest
swinging at the end of a rope. His face was set in coldness; his hair
was streaked with grey; his forehead had a line in the middle; his
manner was rigid, almost frigid, indeed. Only in his eyes was there that
which denied all that his face and manner said--a hungry, absorbing,
hopeless look, the look of one who searches for a friend in the denying
desert.

Somehow, when he bowed low to her, and looked her in the eyes as no one
in all her life had ever done, she had an almost agonized understanding
of what a man feels who has been imprisoned--that is, never the same
again. He was an ex-convict, and yet she did not feel repelled by him.
She did not believe he had killed Erris Boyne. As for the later crime
of mutiny, that did not concern her much. She was Irish; but, more than
that, she was in sympathy with the mutineers. She understood why Dyck
Calhoun, enlisting as a common sailor, should take up their cause and
run risk to advance it. That he had advanced it was known to all the
world; that he had paid the price of his mutiny by saving the king's
navy with a stolen ship had brought him pardon for his theft of a ship
and mutiny; and that he