ight to satisfy him. Yet when the fog cleared, and from
a nearer point, behind a sand dune, he discovered, by the aid of his
glass, that she was seated on the sun-warmed sands combing out her long
hair like a mermaid, he immediately returned to the cabin, and that
morning looked no more that way. In the afternoon, there being no sails
in sight, he turned aside from the bay and walked westward towards the
ocean, halting only at the league-long line of foam which marked the
breaking Pacific surges. Here he was surprised to see a little child,
half-naked, following barefooted the creeping line of spume, or running
after the detached and quivering scraps of foam that chased each other
over the wet sand, and only a little further on, to come upon Cara
herself, sitting with her elbows on her knees and her round chin in her
hands, apparently gazing over the waste of waters before her. A sudden
and inexplicable shyness overtook him. He hesitated, and stepped
half-hidden in a gully between the sand dunes.

As yet he had not been observed; the young girl called to the child and,
suddenly rising, threw off her red cap and shawl and quietly began to
disrobe herself. A couple of coarse towels were at her feet. Jarman
instantly comprehended that she was going to bathe with the child. She
undoubtedly knew as well as he did that she was safe in that solitude;
that no one could intrude upon her privacy from the bay shore, nor from
the desolate inland trail to the sea, without her knowledge. Of his
own contiguity she had evidently taken no thought, believing him safely
housed in his cabin beside the semaphore. She lifted her hands, and with
a sudden movement shook out her long hair and let it fall down her back
at the same moment that her unloosened blouse began to slip from her
shoulders. Richard Jarman turned quickly and walked noiselessly and
rapidly away, until the little hillock had shut out the beach.

His retreat was as sudden, unreasoning, and unpremeditated as his
intrusion. It was not like himself, he knew, and yet it was as perfectly
instinctive and natural as if he had intruded upon a sister. In the
South Seas he had seen native girls diving beside the vessels for coins,
but they had provoked no such instinct as that which possessed him now.
More than that, he swept a quick, wrathful glance along the horizon on
either side, and then, mounting a remote hillock which still hid him
from the beach, he sat there and kept watch and