Her face
showed white in the dark as she looked up appealingly at her brother,
but he turned from her without a sign. Before she could follow him,
Martin Hallowell had seized her by the arm.

"You?" he cried. "You?"

He shook her until she was dizzy, until the dark, windy world spun
before her eyes, he cried out at her with a terrible voice and with
words that she only half understood. All the rage stored up within him
during his bitter struggle to get his ship under way, all the baffled
hopes of his small-spirited revenge, all the shame for his recent
terror broke forth into blind fury against the girl who had stood in
his way.

"I will teach you," he shouted, grasping her arm tighter until she
winced with pain, "I will show you that you can't----"

His words were cut short by a stinging blow across the mouth from
which he staggered back, dropping Cicely's arm and staring in gaping
astonishment at his assailant.

"That is my sister," said Alan, very stiff and quiet and suddenly very
like his father. "Whatever she has done you are not to touch her. She
has ruined my chance of sailing with the _Huntress_, but at least she
has shown me what--what you are, Martin Hallowell."

With his arm about Cicely, Alan went down the pier, while Martin,
confounded and silenced, stood staring after them. The two said
nothing as they climbed the High Street, although much must have been
passing in the boy's mind. As he pushed open their own door and came
into the dusky hallway he spoke for the first time.

"Can you wait here by the fire a minute, Cicely? I am going up first
to--to tell my father what a fool I have been."

* * * * *

The weeks of winter passed, news came that peace had been signed on
Christmas Eve, one after another the ships of war came straggling
home. Some had taken prizes, all had been harried by the winter
storms--and none brought news of the _Huntress_. One Carolina vessel
that put in for repairs told of picking up a crew adrift in boats and
of setting them aboard a ship bound for Chesapeake Bay and the coast
of Delaware.

"They were most of them Swedes," the sailors told Alan, "and they were
not very willing to talk of the ship they had lost, but it might have
been the _Huntress_."

Reuben Hallowell was straining all his resources to send his idle
ships to sea and to reestablish the trade of peace. Yet when he urged
his fellow townsmen to strive to gain the commerce Ame