with my gray hairs, but it was easy to see that he too wanted to go, and that only fear for our safety and comfort made him hesitate.  The day before Anne Ford was due we went.  It was the day, too, after our sail in the moonlight that I half believed, remembering its lovely unreality, had been a dream.  But as we sailed out, there lay Sir Richard Leigh’s yacht to prove it, smart and impressive, shining and solid in the sunlight as it had been ethereal the night before.  I gazed at her with some curiosity.

“Have you been on board?” I asked our sailor.  “Is Sir Richard there?”

Cary glanced at Sally, who had turned a cold shoulder to the yacht and was looking back at Clovelly village, crawling up its deep crack in the cliff.  “Yes,” he said; “I’ve been on her twice.  Sir Richard is living on her.”

“I suppose he’s some queer little rat of a man,” Sally brought out in her soft voice, to nobody in particular.

I was surprised at the girl’s incivility, but Cary answered promptly, “Yes, Miss!” with such cheerful alacrity that I turned to look at him, more astonished.  I met eyes gleaming with a hardly suppressed amusement which, if I had stopped to reason about it, was much out of place.  But yet, as I looked at him with calm dignity and seriousness, I felt myself sorely tempted to laugh back.  I am a bad old woman sometimes.

The Revenge careered along over the water as if mad to get to Lundy, under a strong west wind.  In about two hours the pile of fantastic rocks lay stretched in plain view before us.  We were a mile or more away—­I am a very uncertain judge of distance—­but we could see distinctly the clouds of birds, glittering white sea-gulls, blowing hither and thither above the wild little continent where were their nests.  There are thousands and thousands of gulls on Lundy.  We had sailed out from Clovelly at two in bright afternoon sunshine, but now, at nearly four, the blue was covering with gray, and I saw Cary look earnestly at the quick-moving sky.

“Is it going to rain?” I asked.

He stood at the rudder, feet apart and shoulders full of muscle and full of grace, the handkerchief around his neck a line of flame between blue clothes and olive face.  A lock of bronze hair blew boyishly across his forehead.

“Worse than that,” he said, and his eyes were keen as he stared at the uneven water in front of us.  A basin of smoother water and the yellow tongue of a sand-beach lay beyond it at the foot of a line of high rocks.  “The passage is there”—­he nodded.  “If I can make it before the squall catches us”—­he glanced up again and then turned to Sally.  “Could you sail her a moment while I see to the sheet?  Keep her just so.”  His hand placed Sally’s with a sort of roughness on the rudder.  “Are you afraid?” He paused a second to ask it.

“Not a bit,” said the girl, smiling up at him cheerfully, and then he was working away, and the little Revenge was flying, ripping the waves, every breath nearer by yards to that tumbling patch of wolf-gray water.