“You must be very, very angry and hurt, Donald?”

“I am.  So angry and hurt that I desire to be happy within the shortest possible period of elapsed time.  Now, old girl, look right into my eyes, because I’m going to propose to you for the last time.  My worldly assets consist of about a hundred dollars in cash and a six dollar wedding ring which I bought as I came through Port Agnew.  With these wordly goods and all the love and honor and respect a man can possibly have for a woman, I desire to endow you.  Answer me quickly.  Yes or no?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

“You chatterbox!  When?”

“At your pleasure.”

“That’s trading talk.  We’ll be married this afternoon.”  He stretched out his long arms for her and as she slid off the low hassock and knelt beside his chair, he gathered her hungrily to him and held her there for a long time before he spoke again.  When he did it was to say, with an air of wonder that was almost childlike: 

“I never knew it was possible for a man to be so utterly wretched and so tremendously happy and all within the same hour.  I love you so much it hurts.”  He released her and glanced at his watch.  “It is now two o’clock, Nan.  If we leave here by three we can reach the county seat by five o’clock, procure a license and be married by six.  By half past seven we will have finished our wedding supper and by about ten o’clock we shall be back at the Sawdust Pile.  Put a clean pair of rompers on the young fellow and let’s go!  From this day forward we live, like the Sinn Fein.  ‘For ourselves alone.’”

While Nan was preparing for that hurried ceremony, Donald strolled about the little yard, looking over the neglected garden and marking for future attention various matters such as a broken hinge on the gate, some palings off the fence and the crying necessity for paint on the little white house, for he was striving mightily to shut out all thought of his past life and concentrate on matters that had to do with the future.  Presently he wandered out on the bulkhead.  The great white gulls which spent their leisure hours gravely contemplating the Bight of Tyee from the decaying piling, rose lazily at his approach and with hoarse cries of resentment flapped out to sea; his dull glance followed them and rested on a familiar sight.

Through the Bight of Tyee his father’s barkentine Kohala was coming home from Honolulu, ramping in before a twenty mile breeze with every shred of canvas drawing.  She was heeled over to starboard a little and there was a pretty little bone in her teeth; the colors streamed from her mizzen rigging while from her foretruck the house-flag flew.  Idly Donald watched her until she was abreast and below The Dreamerie and her house-flag dipped in salute to the master watching from the cliff; instantly the young Laird of Tyee saw a woolly puff of smoke break from the terrace below the house and several seconds later the dull boom of the signal gun.  His heart was constricted.  “Ah, never for me!” he murmured, “never for me—­until he tells them to look toward the Sawdust Pile for the master!”