in an effort to recapture
that tormenting woman--.

He drifted down upon Meteor Island, bowed and self-reproachful, like a
spirit approaching the confines of the dead. He stepped ashore and
passed the painter of his dory through its ring.

On the crest of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred,
a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick
grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange
inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead,
not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place
flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and twigs were quite
dissolved in darkness--nothing but the silver pattern of the leaves was
shown in random sprays. He felt for an instant disembodied, like these
leaves--as if, taking one step too many, he had floated out of his own
body and might not return.

"Bear and forbear," he thought. "You wouldn't have stirred, let her say
what she would," his heart whispered to the silver leaves.

But he could not forget that wild glance, the wet hand clinging to his
wrist, the laugh repeated like an echo from the symphony of that
November hillside. He reproached himself withal. What was known of Cad
Sills? Little known, and nothing cared to be known. A waif, pursuing him
invisibly with a twinkle or flare from her passionate eyes. She was the
daughter of a sea captain by his fifth wife. He had escaped the other
four. They had died or been deserted in foreign ports, but this one he
could not escape. Tradition had it that he lost the figurehead from his
ship on the nuptial voyage, attributed this disaster to his bride, and
so left her at Rosario, only to find her, after all sail was set, in the
forechains, at the very stem of his ship, half drowned, her arms
outstretched, a living figurehead. She had swum after him. She outlived
him, too, and died in giving birth to Cad Sills, whose blood had thus a
trace of sea water--.

He entered his house. In his domestic arrangements he was the very
figure of a bachelor. His slimsy silver spoon, dented with toothmarks of
an ancestor who had died in a delirium, was laid evenly by his plate.
The hand lamps on the shelf wore speckled brown-paper bags inverted over
their chimneys. A portrait of a man playing the violin hung out, in
massive gilt, over the table, like a ship's figurehead projecting over a
wharf's end. His red couch bore northeast and southwest, s