en carved from some obdurate material that
opened for the necessities of neither speech nor sustenance.

Tall John Woolfolk was darkly tanned, too, and had a grey gaze,
by turns sharply focused with bright black pupils and blankly
introspective. He was garbed in white flannels, with bare ankles and
sandals, and an old, collarless silk shirt, with sleeves rolled
back on virile arms incongruously tattooed with gauzy green
cicadas.

He stayed motionless while Halvard put the yacht in order for the
night. The day's passage through twisting inland waterways, the hazard
of the tides on shifting flats, the continual concentration on details
at once trivial and highly necessary, had been more wearing than the
cyclone the ketch had weathered off Barbuda the year before. They had
been landbound since dawn; and all day John Woolfolk's instinct had
revolted against the fields and wooded points, turning toward the open
sea.

Halvard disappeared into the cabin; and, soon after, a faint, hot air,
the smell of scorched metal, announced the lighting of the vapor
stove, the preparations for supper. Not a breath stirred the surface
of the bay. The water, as transparently clear as the hardly darkened
air, lay like a great amethyst clasped by its dim corals and the arm
of the land. The glossy foliage that, with the exception of a small
silver beach, choked the shore might have been stamped from metal. It
was, John Woolfolk suddenly thought, amazingly still. The atmosphere,
too, was peculiarly heavy, languorous. It was laden with the scents of
exotic, flowering trees; he recognized the smooth, heavy odor of
oleanders and the clearer sweetness of orange blossoms.

He was idly surprised at the latter; he had not known that orange
groves had been planted and survived in Georgia. Woolfolk gazed more
attentively at the shore, and made out, in back of the luxuriant
tangle, the broad white facade of a dwelling. A pair of marine glasses
lay on the deck at his hand; and, adjusting them, he surveyed the face
of a distinguished ruin. The windows on the stained wall were broken
in--they resembled the empty eyes of the dead; storms had battered
loose the neglected roof, leaving a corner open to sun and rain; he
could see through the foliage lower down great columns fallen about a
sweeping portico.

The house was deserted, he was certain of that--the melancholy
wreckage of a vanished and resplendent time. Its small principality,
flourishing when co