LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

     “She faced him, white as death, looking at him blindly”

     “So he sat there and told her all about his commission”

     “Never had he tasted such a heavenly banquet”

     “Examining the pile of plans, reports, and blue-prints”

     “She walked a few paces toward the house, halted, and looked
     back audaciously”

     “Then fell prone, head buried in her tumbled hair”

     “‘You can’t go!’ he said”

     “And locked in his embrace, she lifted her lips to his”

CHAPTER I

A SKIRMISH

As the wind veered and grew cooler a ribbon of haze appeared above the Gulf-stream.

Young Hamil, resting on his oars, gazed absently into the creeping mist.  Under it the ocean sparkled with subdued brilliancy; through it, shoreward, green palms and palmettos turned silvery; and, as the fog spread, the sea-pier, the vast white hotel, bathing-house, cottage, pavilion, faded to phantoms tinted with rose and pearl.

Leaning there on his oars, he could still make out the distant sands flecked with the colours of sunshades and bathing-skirts; the breeze dried his hair and limbs, but his swimming-shirt and trunks still dripped salt water.

Inshore a dory of the beach guard drifted along the outer line of breakers beyond which the more adventurous bathers were diving from an anchored raft.  Still farther out moving dots indicated the progress of hardier swimmers; one in particular, a girl capped with a brilliant red kerchief, seemed to be already nearer to Hamil than to the shore.

It was all very new and interesting to him—­the shore with its spectral palms and giant caravansary, the misty, opalescent sea where a white steam-yacht lay anchored north of him—­the Ariani—­from which he had come, and on board of which the others were still doubtless asleep—­Portlaw, Malcourt, and Wayward.  And at thought of the others he yawned and moistened his lips, still feverish from last night’s unwisdom; and leaning forward on his oars, sat brooding, cradled by the flowing motion of the sea.

The wind was still drawing into the north; he felt it, never strong, but always a little cooler, in his hair and on his wet swimming-shirt.  The flat cloud along the Gulf-stream spread thickly coastward, and after a little while the ghosts of things terrestrial disappeared.

All around him, now, blankness—­save for the gray silhouette of the Ariani.  A colourless canopy surrounded him, centred by a tiny pool of ocean.  Overhead through the vanishing blue, hundreds of wild duck were stringing out to sea; under his tent of fog the tarnished silver of the water formed a floor smoothly unquiet.