He recollected that he had left the Blanco’s dinghy hauled up on the beach on the tip of Point Old.  He got ashore now in the green dugout and walked across to the Point.

A man is seldom wholly single-track in his ideas, his impulses.  MacRae thought of the dinghy.  He had a care for its possible destruction by the rising sea.  But he thought also of Betty.  There was a pleasure in simply looking at the house in which she lived.  Lights glowed in the windows.  The cottage glistened in the moonlight.

When he came out on the tip of the Point the dinghy, he saw, lay safe where he had dragged it up on the rocks.  And when he had satisfied himself of this he stood with hands thrust deep in his pockets, looking down on Poor Man’s Rock, watching the swirl and foam as each swell ran over its sunken head.

MacRae had a subconscious perception of beauty, beauty of form and color.  It moved him without his knowing why.  He was in a mood to respond to beauty this night.  He had that buoyant, grateful feeling which comes to a man when he has escaped some great disaster, when he is suddenly freed from some grim apprehension of the soul.

The night was one of wonderful beauty.  The moon laid its silver path across the sea.  The oily swells came up that moon-path in undulating folds to break in silver fragments along the shore.  The great island beyond the piercing shaft of the Ballenas light and the mainland far to his left lifted rugged mountains sharp against the sky.  From the southeast little fluffs of cloud, little cottony flecks white as virgin snow, sailed before the wind that mothered the swells.  But there was no wind on Squitty yet.  There was breathless stillness except for the low, spaced mutter of the surf.

He stood a long time, drinking in the beauty of it all,—­the sea and the moon-path, and the hushed, dark woods behind.

Then his gaze, turning slowly, fell on something white in the shadow of a bushy, wind-distorted fir a few feet away.  He looked more closely.  His eyes gradually made out a figure in a white sweater sitting on a flat rock, elbows on knees, chin resting in cupped palms.

He walked over.  Betty’s eyes were fixed on him.  He stared down at her, suddenly tongue-tied, a queer constricted feeling in his throat.  She did not speak.

“Were you sitting here when I came along?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” she said.  “I often come up here.  I have been sitting here for half an hour.”

MacRae sat down beside her.  His heart seemed to be trying to choke him.  He did not know where to begin, or how, and there was much he wanted to say that he must say.  Betty did not even take her chin out of her palms.  She stared out at the sea, rolling up to Squitty in silver windrows.

MacRae put one arm around her and drew her up close to him, and Betty settled against him with a little sigh.  Her fingers stole into his free hand.  For a minute they sat like that.  Then he tilted her head back, looked down into the gray pools of her eyes, and kissed her.