ars, and the
profound inattention of Nature had appalled his agony. A thrill of
pity moved him for the suffering woman beside him. Her mouth was still
unrelaxed. There was in her the material for a struggle against the
invidious past.

In her slender frame the rebellion took on an accent of the heroic.
Woolfolk recalled how utterly he had gone down before mischance. But
his case had been extreme, he had suffered an unendurable wrong at the
hand of Fate. Halvard diverted his thoughts by placing before them a
tray of sugared pineapple and symmetrical cakes. Millie, too, lost her
tension; she showed a feminine pleasure at the yacht's fine napkins,
approved the polish of the glass.

"It's all quite wonderful," she said.

"I have nothing else to care for," Woolfolk told her.

"No place nor people on land?"

"None."

"And you are satisfied?"

"Absolutely," he replied with an unnecessary emphasis. He was, he told
himself aggressively; he wanted nothing more from living and had
nothing to give. Yet his pity for Millie Stope mounted obscurely,
bringing with it thoughts, dim obligations and desires, to which he
had declared himself dead.

"I wonder if you are to be envied?" she queried.

A sudden astounding willingness to speak of himself, even of the past,
swept over him.

"Hardly," he replied. "All the things that men value were killed for
me in an instant, in the flutter of a white skirt."

"Can you talk about it?"

"There's almost nothing to tell; it was so unrelated, so senseless and
blind. It can't be dressed into a story, it has no moral--no meaning.
Well--it was twelve years ago. I had just been married, and we had
gone to a property in the country. After two days I had to go into
town, and when I came back Ellen met me in a breaking cart. It was a
flag station, buried in maples, with a white road winding back to
where we were staying.

"Ellen had trouble in holding the horse when the train left, and the
beast shied going from the station. It was Monday, clothes hung from a
line in a side yard and a skirt fluttered in a little breeze. The
horse reared, the strapped back of the seat broke, and Ellen was
thrown--on her head. It killed her."

He fell silent. Millie breathed sharply, and a ripple struck with a
faint slap on the yacht's side. Then: "One can't allow that," he
continued in a lower voice, as if arguing with himself; "arbitrary,
wanton; impossible to accept such conditions----

"She was young