“Her eyes were like the sea in June,
    Her lips was like a rose,
    Her voice was like a fairy bell
    A-ringin’ crost the snows. 
    Then Denny, he forgot the wrack,
    Forgot the waves a-rollin’,
    For she had put the witchy spell
    On Skipper Dennis Nolan,”

sang the voice behind the blurred yellow square of the window.

Darling approached the window on tip-toe and peered through the dripping glass.  He saw that the vocalist was a long, thin fellow, with long, thin whiskers and a wooden leg, seated in a chair by a glowing stove.  Two candles in tarnished brass sticks, a fiddle and bow, and a glass half full of red liquor that steamed, were on the corner of the deal table at his elbow.  Beside him stood a young woman, long limbed, deep breasted, with a comely face that suggested cheeriness, but was now drawn and shadowed a little round the mouth and eyes with an expression of care.  But it was a good face, trustworthy, kind and wise; and the man at the window trusted it the moment he saw it.

“I’ll risk it,” he muttered.  “The old man looks harmless enough—­and I might stumble around here until the fog lifts or the skipper gets back, without so much as a word with Flora, at this rate.”

He withdrew from the window and slid quietly along the wall of the cabin until he found the door.  He pulled the glove from his right hand and rapped on the wet planks with his bare knuckles.  The voice of the man with the wooden leg stopped dead in the middle of a line and shouted, “Come in.”  Darling lifted the latch, pushed the door half open, and stepped swiftly into the lighted room, closing the door smartly behind him.  The man and the girl stared at him in astonishment.  He removed his dripping cap from his head.

“Can you tell me where I can find Miss Flora Lockhart?” he asked.

The man gasped at that, and the girl’s gray eyes brightened.  The girl stepped forward, placed a strong, eager hand on his arm and gazed into his face without apology or embarrassment.  Darling returned the scrutiny unabashed.

“Ye be from up-along?” she queried.  “Ye be a friend o’ Flora’s?”

“Yes,” replied Darling.  “I have heard that she is in this harbor—­and that no word of her being here, or even of her being alive, has been sent out.  Her friends believe her to be dead.  And I heard that the man you call skipper is—­is keeping her against her will.  Of course, against her will!  I have come to take her away—­back to the world in which she belongs.”

“Be ye alone, sir?” asked Pat Kavanagh, combing his beard with his long, lean fingers.

Darling frowned.  “That’s as may be,” he said.  “Alone or not, I’m no such fool as to tell it until I know how I stand with you; but I am armed, you may be sure!”