slanting her
lashes. "You certainly are. I've heard of you. Yes, I have, only this
morning. I'm a solitary like yourself. See here. You and I could set the
world on fire if we joined hands. Do you know that?"

The little man was struck dumb at his oars for very fear of the boldness
of her advance. He recognized this for an original and fearsome, not to
say delectable, vein of talk. She came on like the sea itself, impetuous
and all-embracing. Unfathomed, too. Could fancy itself construct a woman
so, pat to his hand?

"Is it true that you despise women as they say?" she whispered. She
breathed close, and electrified the tip of his ear with a tendril of
hair. He saw that she wore coral now, in place of the pearls. But her
lips were redder than the coral. He raised his head.

"Yesterday morning you sold pearls for the benefit of Sam Dreed," he
said, in dull tones. "And here you are with your brimstone fairly in my
boat."

He looked at her as if the Old Roke himself had clambered into the boat,
with his spell of doom.

"I am not afraid of helping honest men in trouble that I know of," said
Cad Sills, sucking in her lower lip. "But do you throw that up to me?"

Jethro felt the wickedness of his position like a breath of fire fanning
his cheek. Perilously tempted, he sagged back on the oars without a
word.

"Soho! you're setting me ashore," said that dark woman, laughing. "I
don't wear very well in the eye and that's a plain conclusion."

She laid a finger to her breast, and her eye mocked him. This brazen
hardness put him from his half-formed purpose. He addressed himself to
the oars, and the dory grated on the shore.

"Good-bye, then, little man," she said, springing past him.

But even now she lingered and looked back, biting the coral and letting
it fall, intimating that a word, a whispered syllable, might lay her
low.

He sat like a man crushed to earth. When he raised his head she was
gone.

Was this the voice from the seaward side of Meteor? True, the sea had
yielded this wild being up, but did she speak with the sea's voice? She
had at least the sea's inconstancy, the sea's abandonment.

Her words were hot and heavy in little Rackby's heart. Serene harbor
master that he was, the unearthly quiet of his harbor was an affront
upon him in his present mood. Now that she was lost to him, he could
not, by any makeshift of reason, be rid of the impulse that had come
upon him to jump fairly out of his own skin