Nan was in magnificent spirits, her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkling with the joy of a child. Stuart watched her with growing wonder at her eternal youth. She was more beautiful in her stylish yachting costume than the day she landed in New York, at nineteen.

There was not a line in the smooth surface of her rounded neck and shoulders.

The night was one of extraordinary springlike air though it was the fifteenth of December. A gentle breeze was blowing from the south and the full moon flooded the smooth sea with soft silvery radiance. Nan insisted that Stuart sit on deck with her. There was no help for it.

Bivens would allow no one except the doctor in his room, and so he resigned himself to the beauty of the glorious scene. Not a sound broke the stillness save the soft ripple of the water about the bow of the swan-like yacht.

Nan sat humming a song, when she suddenly stopped and leaned toward Stuart.

"Jim!" she said, softly.

He looked up with a start.

"I honestly believe you were asleep!" she laughed with a touch of petulance.

"No," he protested seriously. "I was just drinking in the joy of this wonderful night."

"Forgetting that I exist?"

Stuart looked at her intently a moment and said, gravely:

"As if any man who ever knew you, could forget!"

"I don't like your attitude, Jim, and I think we'd better fight it out here and now in the beginning of this trip."

"And what is my offense?"

"Not offense, but defense."

"Why Nan!"

"It's useless to deny it," she said banteringly. "You hesitated to come on deck with me in the moonlight this evening. You've kept trotting to Cal's stateroom, when he only begs to be let alone."

"Honestly----"

"It's no use to shuffle. I'm going to be perfectly frank with you. Your assumption of such chilling virtue is insulting. I wish an apology and a promise never to do so again."

"Have I really made you feel this?" he asked, contritely.

"You have, and feel it keenly. Let's come to an understanding. You and I both live in glass houses set on a very high hill. No matter what may be the secrets of my heart, I'm not a fool and you can trust my good sense."

Stuart pressed her hand, and said gently:

"I'm awfully sorry if I've made such an ass of myself that you have received this impression."

"You repent?"

"In sackcloth and ashes."

"Then I forgive you," she cried, with a laugh, releasing her hand and rising, "but on one condition."

"Name it."

"That from this hour you be your old self, without restraint, and let me be mine."

"I promise faithfully."

"Then, you can help me down that steep companion-way and I'll go to bed."

He held her hand with firm grasp as she picked her way down the steps.

Her eyes looked straight into the depths of his as her face almost touched him. He was sure that she had felt the mad impulse to take her in his arms that quivered in every nerve and muscle of his body, for his hand trembled and she smiled.

At her stateroom door she paused, smiled again and said:

"Good night."

His answer was very low.

"Good night."

But he didn't spend a good night. The longer he thought of it the more sinister and dangerous he felt his position. At last he squarely faced the fact that his desire for Nan had increased a hundred-fold by the fact that he had lost her, and that it might become a dangerous mania under the conditions of physical nearness which this little schooner made inevitable.

As he sat in the darkness in his stateroom he could hear every sound in the adjoining one which she occupied as plainly as if the thin panelling of wood were not between them.

He was a fool to be caught in such a trap! His love had been too big and serious a tragedy to end in a vulgar intrigue. There was something painful and stupefying in the spell which she threw over his senses. He realized, too, that she had put him practically at her mercy by the promise he had given. And what made it all the more dangerous was that she was sincere, and apparently sure of herself.

He made up his mind to cut his trip short on some pretext, and in the meantime he would devote himself faithfully to an attempt to start Bivens on the road to a recovery of his shattered health.

At eight o'clock the next morning the black nose of the _Buccaneer_ slowly felt her way into Hog Island Inlet on the shores of old Virginia and dropped her anchor in the deep waters of the channel back of the sand spit on which the U.S. Life Saving station is built.

As Stuart stepped on deck a great flock of thousands of brant swept in from sea and pitched on the bar beyond the channel. A cloud of black ducks circled gracefully overhead and slowly spread out on their feeding grounds beyond the brant.

His heart gave a throb of primitive joy. He was a boy again, and the world was young.

"Confound them!" he cried. "I'll show these ducks a trick or two before this trip is over."

He was glad he came. To the devil with worry and women and all the problems of the universe! He watched the flight of the birds for half an hour, entranced with the memories they evoked. He made up his mind to stay the whole month out and get even with them for a hundred bitter disappointments they had given him in the past.

The long gleaming sweep of the Broadwater Bay, stretching from the tip of the Cape Charles peninsula to the mouth of the Delaware, was literally alive with ducks.

Bivens had put him in command of the little schooner and he gave orders at once to lower a tender and tow her to an old anchorage he knew in a little cove behind Gull Marsh.

And then his trouble began with Bivens.

Stuart rushed to his stateroom and described the prospects of a great day in the blinds with boyish enthusiasm. It didn't move Bivens, except to rage.

"Let 'em fly if they want to, I'm not going to budge. Go yourself, Jim."

Stuart was furious, and began to talk to Bivens as if he were a schoolboy.

"Go myself!" he cried with rage. "What do you suppose I gave up my work and came down here a month for?"