WAS alone out on the Point trying to think what I was going to do with Grace Airley now I'd got her, for she had been telling me how we were to spend our honeymoon, and about the castles we were to buy, and had ended by touching me for her bridge debts; so I was thinking maybe I'd have to go to work, after all, when I looked out to sea just in time to see the dear old Drusilla rounding the Point.

But I had no more than said, "Well, I'll be damned!" to the Drusilla's heels than I heard a woman scream out my name, and, turning quickly, saw little Polly Beeson, one of the Airley maids. What had

scared her was more than I could guess, for there was never a soul in sight but herself and me; but she fainted dead away before I could ask her what was the matter. By the time I had got to her she had opened her eyes and raised up on one elbow.

"Drop in the grass! Then work your way over the bluff-under the roots that hang over. Get up under them-dig down into the sand and cover yourself with it-" Then she began to cry.

I said, "Whatever is the row?" and stood still, looking down at her. She struck at me like a cat for my slowness.

"I tell you, get down! There'll be time enough to talk when you're hidden."

"You'll have to stay here all night," she announced presently. "I'll try to get food to you, and we may be able to plan something." But her tone was not hopeful. "And, mind you, keep down! Once you're found I can't do anything more."

She rose and without another look at me started back along the beach. I looked out to sea, and saw the Drusilla again, hull down this time, going into a pink and gold sunset. She and the sun dropped together, and then I heard the cheering. Like a baseball field in the distance just exactly.

I lifted my head above the fringe of grass where Polly had left me, and the land side of all those big cottages of ours, that had been solemnly boarded up for the winter that afternoon, was blazing with light, the windows shining as if it were the height of the season.

So that was it! Our incomparable Islanders, fisher-folk trained for twenty years as maids and butlers, were in the habit of skylarking with the property left in their care. Polly's horror had prepared me for a more dignified complication than that. Why, I wouldn't tell on them! I would merely stroll down there among them, jolly them a little, tip like a giant, and grin like the quality of mercy. But when the cheering stopped and the surf was the only noise left, I began to hear the merest insect thread of sounda voice. At that distance it must have been an extraordinary one to sound so clearly. It kept up for an hour.

I couldn't distinguish a word, of course, but it made me think, that voice, of how Captain Kidd and his crew are said to have meddled with our Islanders' ancestry somewhere back, and I wondered how it would have sounded bawling orders against a gale. I meekly crouched down as Polly had ordered while a strong seawind set in, blowing the sand in my face and stirring up a choppy blackness between me and my own world-a blackness that was presently shot with drifts of VOL. LIV.-65

I was cold and hungry. As it seemed impenetrably dark, I got up at last to walk up and down, stamping to keep warm. Pirates? It had not occurred to me before that our agreeable and useful Islanders were different from any other of those human appliances we engage to take most of the details of living off our hands. But now the thread of that mighty voice persisted in my ear like a mosquito. Captain Kidd? My startled mind reviewed the incidents which had made us decide to recruit our Island servants wholly from the natives. Twenty years ago that decision had been reached, after a series of casualties-drownings, falling from cliffs, a suicide or two-until we were like to have been without any service at all, for not a man Jack would come with us from the mainland. Then old Beeson had appeared from nowhere in particular, and after that there had been no more trouble-none at all. It had been a service of oil and honey. The whole colony of us shut up the Island in the fall and went away, and in the spring came back to it to find everything as we had left it, polished, shining, and oiled, an uncrumpled rose-leaf, ointment without a fly.

But now their faces-that dark, hawklike Island type-began to start out at me like objects in a fog. Once I had squarely met the eyes of that old patriarch Beeson, the Airley butler. I had been having a little collision with a maid and a tray. He happened in as the mess was being wiped up, and—the look he gave me! It smoothed out directly the maid spoke, and yet there was something about it that lingered tinglingly. Beeson wasn't the hawk type; he was smooth and pale and bland, like and a cool sensation trickled down my spine-like Long John Silver. I had fully decided that he was the orator of the evening; yet thinking of Devries, the club barber, whose profile was like Savonarola, I reserved a suspicion of him also. That bleak sea-wind helped my fancy to dress up both old rascals with handkerchiefs around their heads, rings in their ears, and sashes stuck full of cutlasses and pistols, and set them to pacing quarter-decks, having burst out

of their smug livery like chickens out of shells. I was falling into a drowsy nightmare about keelhauling, when there was a rustle not made by the wind, and little Polly Beeson came up in a gray dress that was invisible against the sand and made a ghost of her.

"I've brought you some food, but you mustn't stop to eat it now. Hurry! Come down to the beach. Don't stand up against the sky-line!"

"The tide will cover our steps," she panted. It was already coming in, and she ran so close to the water that her feet splashed in it now and then. And so for two miles we scurried like sandpipers, then up a sandy bluff to the deserted fisherhuts. She pushed open a door that swung on one hinge.

"You must get along without light or heat," said she, and with no more than that was gone again in the windy dark. A fog was riding in, and its tears hung thick on my white flannels. I gazed sorrowfully at the capable fireplace. Had not light and heat been taboo, I might have summoned up philosophy of a sort. As it was, I ate what Polly had brought gratefully, distinguishing cake from meat by touch and smell, then fubbed off my discomfort with a cigarette, seating myself on a whale's vertebra, which seemed intended to serve as a chair. And so, leaning my head upon my folded arms, I fell asleep.

When I woke there were voices outside the door and it was light.

"Polly, Polly!" a man was saying. "Who's the stowaway this time, Polly?" As she made no answer, he went on: "I don't think I can bear to see you cry, Polly. Maybe I'll help. Is it Watkins?" "Oh, well!" came her answer at last, and the tears in it were plain, "he was out on the Point when the Drusilla sailed. I -well, I thought at first it was you, and was running to catch up, and then-I went all to pieces! I finally got him scared enough to hide. But, oh, why did they have to begin their noise before the patrol had been around? Twentyfour hours would have saved him."

"Perhaps some of us think twenty-four hours of liberty more important than the welfare of Mr. Watkins."

She gave a little wail of protest. "Welfare! But, Billy, this one isn't a bad

sort-really. Why, if one dispensed with all the people in the world that haven't anything the matter with them except general uselessness- He's not a Hathaway! That one— I'd never have interfered for Hathaway."

"I should say not!" He was silent for a space, then observed interestedly: "D'you know, I've sometimes wondered whether we shouldn't think better of these people if we saw them on the mainland. This is their playground. Now, when they go back, they they work at something, don't they?" He spoke with the calm speculation of the ethnologist. He really did not know. Neither did Polly.

"I suppose they must," she agreed doubtfully; "but they don't talk about it -at least the women don't."

They seemed to give the subject a moment's silent wonder, then Billy said crisply: "Well, suppose we go in to the patient?"

The door opened and I saw that Billy was the big life-saver whose stunt was sitting around the bathing beach all summer and towing back the girls when they got to showing off too hard. But now, instead of being a splendid bronze statue in blue trunks, he was dressed like all the other Islanders when out of livery, in millionaire cast-offs, very tight across the shoulders and flappy around the waist. His red-bronze face-how did it happen that in all the many times I had seen the man I had never known what eyes he had? Meeting them now, full, my question that had been conceived with something of threatening dignity fell peevish and impudent. Nevertheless, I got it out:

"And what was it happened to Hathaway?" I asked.

"Went to Africa to hunt lions, didn't he?" answered Billy calmly. "Why, have you news of him?"

"I seemed to have, just now."

"Oh!" cried out Polly; "all my fault!" and turned away with her hands over her face.

Billy looked at me very intently.

"Did you know him well? Does any one over there"-he motioned seaward with his head—“want him back?” And as I hesitated what to answer: "Suppose we forget him, then."

I looked toward Polly, who was sobbing in a corner.

"Shall we forget him?" said Billy. "For the present," I conceded. "For all time, or Polly and I walk away and leave you to shift for yourself." But I shirked the issue, and avoiding the brightness of his eyes let my glance travel critically about the deserted cabin, picking out the sagging door, the blight and mildew upon the poor furnishings. "You don't seem to be using your own houses much," I remarked.

"Why should we?" he quietly retorted. "We've stopped being fishermen, haven't we? And you've built up our moors and replaced our roses and yellow clover and huckleberries with formal gardens. Must we, then, stay out of your comfortable empty city and huddle all winter in our huts, worse off than our parents before you came? Men expect strange things of each other," said Billy Strait.

"I don't see any great objection to Box and Cox," said I, "if you vacate in time and don't injure things, but when it comes to putting witnesses out of the way, as you admit you did with Hathaway... Billy strolled over to the window, where Polly was keeping a lookout. "You'll soon be able to talk that over with some one who can answer you better than I," he threw over his shoulder.

But Polly, darting from the window, pushed me backward into a musty little closet, closing the door after me, while creatures disturbed by my entry scuttled into crevices.

"Give him more time!" I heard her plead. "It was all my fault. I could never be happy if that happened through me. Don't you see?"

"I see that you are wonderfully anxious about him."

"Why, Billy! you don't . . . you're never thinking I care for him!"

He did not answer at once. "For a moment I was puzzled," he said at length, "but I see. Of course. Kiss me, and

then we'll talk to them."

Mingling with his words came the soft crunch of steps in the sand, and directly Polly's voice, pretending laughter: "Here we are, boys!"

"Hello, Polly! Well, well-and Billy, too! Back to the old sod!" came the reply with cheerful humor.

I gathered an impression that the room was crowded. There was a suppressed

moving about, a sound of breathing as if from ten or a dozen people.

"How long have you two been here?" The question was rasped out sharply, and at the same time something rubbed heavily against the door of my cupboard, as though a man were leaning there. In a panic lest the weak hinges should give way I softly placed my own shoulders as a counter brace, and there we stood, back to back, with only the rotting wood between us.

"Ten minutes-maybe half an hour. Why, Connie?" asked Polly tranquilly. "Have you seen anything in our line?" The first voice broke in with some indignation. "Now, look here, who's in charge here anyway, and since when have we taken to bothering the girls about our business? There's nobody here but Billy and Polly. Get out! For'rd march!"

Straightway the shoulders against which I had been so anxiously leaning were withdrawn, and had my recovery not been of the quickest I should have betrayed myself then and there by falling into the room. I heard them, as I thought, all go out, and there being no voice or movement for several minutes, concluded that Polly and Billy had accompanied them. Nevertheless I remained as I was, and I had not long to wait before there was once more a step in the sand-a man's step; Billy returning, no doubt. I drew a breath of relief. The step entered the doorway, making a gritty sound of wet sand ground between the rubber sole and the floor, crossed directly to my hiding-place, and the door was thrown wide.

"You may come out now, Mr. Watkins," said the sharp voice, and I looked into the hawk-face of young Devries. He was his father's assistant at the club. I had been shaved by him once, and when he had cut me most inexcusably I had expressed my mind with great freedom. I don't know whether he was remembering that incident as we faced each other there; but I was, vividly.

He covered me with a revolver. "Oh, put it up!" said I, trying to assume an air of bored indifference. "I sha'n't try to fight a whole island full of lunatics."

He made no conversation as we started back along the beach. The fog was rolling seaward. A stormy sunlight touched