ng lights to
transgress the harbor lines he had decreed. How, then, should his own
house not be in order?

But this was just what he had thought when Caddie Sills first darted the
affliction of love into his bosom. Somewhere beyond the harbor mouth
were the whispers of the tide's unrest, never to be quite shut out. Let
him turn his back on that prospect as he would, the Old Roke would
scandalize him still.

A man overtaken by deadly sickness, he resolved upon any sacrifice to
effect a cure. On the morrow he presented himself at the jeweler's and
asked to be shown the necklace.

"It is sold at last," said the jeweler, going through the motions of
washing his hands.

"Sold? Who to?"

"To Peter Loud," said the jeweler.

Jethro Rackby pressed the glass case hard with his finger ends. What
should Deep-water Peter be doing with a string of pearls? He must go at
once. Yet he must not return empty-handed. He bought a small pendant,
saw it folded into its case, and dropped the case into his pocket.

When he came to the harbor's edge he found a fleecy fog had stolen in.
The horn at the harbor's mouth groaned like a sick horse. As he pulled
toward Meteor the fog by degrees stole into his very brain until he
could not rightly distinguish the present from the past, and Caddie
Sills, lean-hipped and dripping, seemed to hover in the stern.

At one stroke he pulled out of the fog. Then he saw a strong, thick
rainbow burning at the edge of the fog, a jewel laid in cotton wool.
Its arch just reached the top of the bank, and one brilliant foot was
planted on Meteor Island.

"That signifies that I shall soon be out of my trouble," he thought,
joyfully.

The fog lifted; the green shore stood out again mistily, then more
vividly, like a creation of the brain. He saw the black piles of the
herring wharf, and next the west face of the church clock, the hands and
numerals glittering like gold.

The harbor was now as calm as a pond, except for the pink and dove color
running vaporously on the back of a long swell from the south. A white
light played on the threshold of the sea, and the dark bank of
seaward-rolling fog presently revealed that trembling silver line in all
its length, broken only where the sullen dome of Meteor rose into it.

High above, two wondrous knotty silver clouds floated, whose image
perfectly appeared in the water.

"Glory be!" said Jethro Rackby, aloud. He hastened his stroke.

Rackby, returning to the