," he once more took up the narrative; "a girl in a
tennis skirt with a gay scarf about her waist--quite dead in a second.
The clothes still fluttered on the line. You see," he ended, "nothing
instructive, tragic--only a crude dissonance."

"Then you left everything?"

He failed to answer, and she gazed with a new understanding and
interest over the _Gar_. Her attention was attracted to the beach,
and, following her gaze, John Woolfolk saw the bulky figure of
Nicholas gazing at them from under his palm. A palpable change, a
swift shadow, enveloped Millie Stope.

"I must go back," she said uneasily; "there will be dinner, and my
father has been alone all morning."

But Woolfolk was certain that, however convincing the reasons she put
forward, it was none of these that was taking her so hurriedly ashore.
The dread that for the past few hours had almost vanished from her
tones, her gaze, had returned multiplied. It was, he realized, the
objective fear; her entire being was shrinking as if in anticipation
of an imminent calamity, a physical blow.

Woolfolk himself put her on the beach; and, with the tender canted on
the sand, steadied her spring. As her hand rested on his arm it
gripped him with a sharp force; a response pulsed through his body;
and an involuntary color rose in her pale, fine cheeks.

Nicholas, stolidly set with his shoes half buried in the sand,
surveyed them without a shade of feeling on his thick countenance. But
Woolfolk saw that the other's fingers were crawling toward his pocket.
He realized that the man's dully smiling mask concealed sultry,
ungoverned emotions, blind springs of hate.

VII

Again on the ketch the inevitable reaction overtook him. He had spoken
of Ellen's death to no one until now, through all the years when he
had been a wanderer on the edge of his world, and he bitterly
regretted his reference to it. In speaking he had betrayed his
resolution of solitude. Life, against all his instinct, his wishes,
had reached out and caught him, however lightly, in its tentacles.

The least surrender, he realized, the slightest opening of his
interest, would bind him with a multitude of attachments; the octopus
that he dreaded, uncoiling arm after arm, would soon hold him again, a
helpless victim for the fury Chance.

He had made a disastrous error in following his curiosity, the
insistent scent of the wild oranges, to the house where Millie had
advanced on the dim portico. His