egro on a load of wood--or a mammy singing plaintively in the
flower-bright dooryard of a house.

Sometimes losing, sometimes finding, the trail of a green and white
van, the long black car shot on, through roads of pleasant windings
flanked by forest and river, beyond which lay the line of green-fringed
sand hills which parallel the rolling Atlantic. Past placid lakes
skimmed by purple martins, past orange groves heavy with fruit, past
fences overrun with Cherokee roses, and on, but the driver, abroad with
the sunrise glow, seemed somehow to see little or none of it.
Sometimes he stared sombrely at a ghostly palmetto, tall and dark
against the sky. Once with a grinding shudder of brakes he halted on
the border of a cypress swamp and stared frowningly at the dark, dank
trees knee-deep in stagnant water above which the buzzards flew, as if
the loathsome spot matched his mood. As indeed it did.

For the words of Themar had done cruel work. Torn by black suspicion,
Ronador saw no peace in this tranquil Florida world of sun and flower,
of warm south wind and bright-winged bird. He saw only the buzzards,
birds of evil omen. Swayed by fiery gusts of passion, of remorse, of
sullenness and jealousy, he rode on, a prey to sinister resolution. To
confront Diane with his knowledge of those days by the river, this
resolution alternated as frequently with another--to put his fate to
the test and passionately avow his utter trust in one immeasurably
above the rank and file of women. He had racked Themar with insistent
questions, he had quarreled again and again with the Baron since that
night by the pool, until now he had at his finger-ends, the ways and
days of Philip Poynter since the day the Baron had dispatched his young
secretary upon the ill-fated errand to Diane. And as there were finer
moments when his faith in the girl was unmarred by suspicion, so there
were wild, unscrupulous hours of jealousy when he could have killed
Philip and taunted her with insults.

Driving steadily, he came in course of time to a narrow, grass-banked
creek. The nomads on the winding road beside it were many and
beautiful. Here were yellow butterflies, sandpipers and kingfishers,
and now and then an eagle cleaved the dazzling blue overhead with
magnificent wing-strokes. Sand hills reflected the white sunlight.
Beyond glistened a stretch of open sea with a flock of beautiful
gannets of black and white whipping its surface. But Ronador