“Because there are people for whom there’s nothing else.  If you can’t offer a safe place, why rescue at all?  Though it’s true,” he laughed, “that I hadn’t the courage of my convictions in the matter.  After that look—­oh I haven’t been able to make it live—­burn—­as it did—­she passed on the Island, the guard evidently thinking she was with some people who had just got out of an automobile and gone on for a walk.  And suddenly I was corrupted, driven by that impulse for saving life, that beautiful passion for keeping things alive to suffer which is so humorously grounded in the human race.”

He stopped with a little laugh.  Watching him, Katie was thinking one need have small fear of his not always being “corrupted.”  There was a light in his eyes spoke for “corruption.”

“I saw her making straight across the Island,” he went back to his story.  “I knew.  And I knew that on the other side she might find things very conveniently arranged for her purpose.  I turned the boat and went at its best speed around the head of the Island.  Hugged the shore on your side.  Pulled into a little cove.  Waited.”

He looked at Katie, comparing her with an a priori idea of her.  “I saw you sitting up there in the sun—­on the bunker.  Just having received the last will and testament, as it were, of this other human soul, can’t you fancy how I hated you—­sitting there so serenely in the sun?”

“But why hate me?” she demanded passionately.  “That’s where you’re small and unjust!  I don’t make the crazed crowds, do I?”

“Yes; that’s just what you do.  There’d be no crowds if it weren’t for you.  You take up too much room.”

“I don’t see why you want to—­hurt me like that,” she said unevenly.  “Don’t you want me to enjoy my place any more?  Will it do any good for me to get in the crowd?  What can I do about it?”

Looking into her passionately earnest face it was perhaps the gulf between the girl and his a priori idea of her brought the smile—­a smile no kin to that hard smile of his.  And looking with a different slant across the gulf there was a sort of affectionate roguery in his eyes as he asked:  “Do you want to know what I honestly think about you?”

She nodded.

“I think you’re in for it!”

“In for what?”

“I don’t think you’ve the ghost of a chance to escape!” he gloated.

“Escape—­what?”

“Seeing.  And when you do—!” He laughed—­that laugh one thinks of as the exclusive possession of an affectionate understanding.  And when it died to a smile, something tenderly teasing flickered in that smile.

She flushed under it.  “You were telling me—­we keep stopping.”

“Yes, don’t we?  I wonder if we always would.”

“We keep stopping to quarrel.”

“Yes—­to quarrel.  I wonder if we always would.”

“I haven’t a doubt of it in the world,” said Katie feelingly, and they laughed together as friends laugh together.