“I beg your pardon, Miss Meade.  She was heading off a bit dangerously.”

And he went on with directions, laughing at her a little, scolding her a little, yet all with a manner that could not be criticised.  I still wonder how he could have poised so delicately and so long on that slender line of possible behavior.

As the boat slipped over the shimmering ocean, back into the harbor again, most of the houses up the sharp ascent of Clovelly street were dark, but out on the water lay a mass of brilliant lights, rocking slowly on the tide.  Sally was first to notice it.

“There is a ship lying out there.  Is it a ship or is it an enchantment?  She is lighted all over.  What is it—­do you know?”

Cary was working at the sail and he did not look at us or at it as he answered.

“Yes, Miss—­I know her.  She is Sir Richard Leigh’s yacht the Rose.  She was there as we went out, but she was dark and you did not notice her.”

I exclaimed, full of interest, at this, but Sally, standing ghost-like in her white dress against the sinking sail, said nothing, but stared at the lights that outlined the yacht against the deep distance of the sky, and that seemed, as the shadowy hull swung dark on the water, to start out from nowhere in pin-pricks of diamonds set in opal moonlight.

Lundy Island lies away from Clovelly to the northwest seventeen miles off on the edge of the world.  Each morning as I opened my window at the Inn, and looked out for the new day’s version of the ocean, it lifted a vague line of invitation and of challenge.  Since we had been in Devonshire the atmosphere of adventure that hung over Lundy had haunted me with the wish to go there.  It was the “Shutter,” the tall pinnacle of rock at its southern end, that Amyas Leigh saw for his last sight of earth, when the lightning blinded him, in the historic storm that strewed ships of the Armada along the shore.  I am not a rash person, yet I was so saturated with the story of “Westward Ho!” that I could not go away satisfied unless I had set foot on Lundy.  But it had the worst of reputations, and landing was said to be hazardous.

“It isn’t that I can’t get you there,” said Cary when I talked to him, “but I might not be able to get you away.”

Then he explained in a wise way that I did not entirely follow, how the passage through the rocks was intricate, and could only be done with a right wind, and how, if the wind changed suddenly, it was impossible to work out until the right wind came again.  And that might not be for days, if one was unlucky.  It had been known to happen so.  Yet I lingered over the thought, and the more I realized that it was unreasonable, the more I wanted to go.  The spirit of the Devonshire seas seemed, to my fancy, to live on the guarded, dangerous rocks, and I must pay tribute before I left his kingdom.  Cary laughed a little at my one bit of adventurous spirit so out of keeping