lk turned from his scrutiny of the ketch to his companion, and
was surprised to see her, with all the joy evaporated from her
countenance, clinging rigidly to the rail. He said to himself,
"Seasick." Then he realized that it was not a physical illness that
possessed her, but a profound, increasing terror. She endeavored to
smile back at his questioning gaze, and said in a small, uncertain
voice:

"It's so--so big!"

For a moment he saw in her a clear resemblance to the shrinking figure
of Lichfield Stope. It was as though suddenly she had lost her fine
profile and become indeterminate, shadowy. The grey web of the old
deflection in Virginia extended over her out of the past--of the past
that, Woolfolk thought, would not die.

The _Gar_ rose higher still, dropped into the deep, watery valley, and
the woman's face was drawn and wet, the back of her straining hand was
dead white. Without further delay John Woolfolk put the wheel sharply
over and told his man, "We're going about." Halvard busied himself
with the shaking sails.

"Really--I'd rather you didn't," Millie gasped. "I must learn ... no
longer a child."

But Woolfolk held the ketch on her return course; his companion's
panic was growing beyond her control. They passed once more between
the broken waves and entered the still bay with its border of
flowering earth. There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie sat
gazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedly
distressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight,
hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmatic
governess; it was in contradiction to the rest.

"How strange," she said at last in an insuperably weary voice, "to be
forced back to this place that I loathe, by myself, by my own
cowardice. It's exactly as if my spirit were chained--then the body
could never be free. What is it," she demanded of John Woolfolk, "that
lives in our own hearts and betrays our utmost convictions and
efforts, and destroys us against all knowledge and desire?"

"It may be called heredity," he replied; "that is its simplest phase.
The others extend into the realms of the fantastic."

"It's unjust," she cried bitterly, "to be condemned to die in a pit
with all one's instinct in the sky!"

The old plea of injustice quivered for a moment over the water and
then died away. John Woolfolk had made the same passionate protest, he
had cried it with clenched hands at the withdrawn st