fear. "What has happened?" she cried breathlessly while
yet a little distance away. "Tell me at once----"

"Nothing," Woolfolk promptly replied, appalled by the agony in her
voice. "Nicholas and I had a small misunderstanding. A triviality," he
added, thinking of the other's hand groping beneath the apron.

VI

On the morning following the breaking of his water cask John Woolfolk
saw the slender figure of Millie on the beach. She waved and called,
her voice coming thin and clear across the water:

"Are visitors--encouraged?"

He sent Halvard in with the tender, and as they approached, dropped a
gangway over the _Gar's_ side. She stepped lightly down into the
cockpit with a naive expression of surprise at the yacht's immaculate
order. The sails lay precisely housed, the stays, freshly tarred,
glistened in the sun, the brasswork and newly varnished mahogany
shone, the mathematically coiled ropes rested on a deck as spotless as
wood could be scraped.

"Why," she exclaimed, "it couldn't be neater if you were two nice old
ladies!"

"I warn you," Woolfolk replied, "Halvard will not regard that
particularly as a compliment. He will assure you that the order of
a proper yacht is beyond the most ambitious dream of a mere
housekeeper."

She laughed as Halvard placed a chair for her. She was, Woolfolk
thought, lighter in spirit on the ketch than she had been on shore;
there was the faintest imaginable stain on her petal-like cheeks; her
eyes, like olive leaves, were almost gay. She sat with her slender
knees crossed, her fine arms held with hands clasped behind her head,
and clad in a crisply ironed, crude white dress, into the band of
which she had thrust a spray of orange blossoms.

John Woolfolk was increasingly conscious of her peculiar charm. Millie
Stope, he suddenly realized, was like the wild oranges in the
neglected grove at her door. A man brought in contact with her
magnetic being charged with appealing and mysterious emotions, in a
setting of exotic night and black sea, would find other women, the
ordinary concourse of society, insipid--like faintly sweetened water.

She was entirely at home on the ketch, sitting against the immaculate
rim of deck and the sea. He resented that familiarity as an
unwarranted intrusion of the world he had left. Other people, women
among them, had unavoidably crossed his deck, but they had been
patently alien, momentary; but Millie, with her still delight at the
yach