As soon as Jack stepped ashore he telegraphed to Edith that the yacht had had an accident in the harbor, but that no one was hurt.  When he reached the hotel he found a letter from Edith of such a tenor that he sent another despatch, saying that she might expect him at once, leaving the yacht behind.  There was a buzz of excitement in the town, and there were a hundred rumors, which the sight of the yacht and its passengers landed in safety scarcely sufficed to allay.

When Jack called at the Tavish cottage to say good-by, both the ladies were too upset to see him.  He took a night train, and as he was whirled away in the darkness the events of the preceding forty-eight hours seemed like a dream.  Even the voyage up the coast was a little unreal—­an insubstantial episode in life.  And the summer city by the sea, with its gayety and gossip and busy idleness, sank out of sight like a phantom.  He drew his cap over his eyes, and was impatient that the rattling train did not go faster, for Edith, waiting there in the Golden House, seemed to stretch out her arms for him to come.  Still behind him rose a picture of that bacchanalian breakfast—­the Major and Carmen and Mavick and Miss Tavish dancing a reel on the sloping deck, then the rising wind, the reckless daring of the race, and a vision of sudden death.  He shuddered for the first time in a quick realization of how nearly it came to being all over with life and its pleasures.

XIV

Edith had made no appeal to Jack to come home.  His going, therefore, had the merit in his eyes of being a voluntary response to the promptings of his better nature.  Perhaps but for the accident at Mount Desert he might have felt that his summer pleasure was needlessly interfered with, but the little shock of that was a real, if still temporary, moral turning-point for him.  For the moment his inclination seemed to run with his duty, and he had his reward in Edith’s happiness at his coming, the loving hunger in her eyes, the sweet trust that animated her face, the delightful appropriation of him that could scarcely brook a moment’s absence from her sight.  There could not be a stronger appeal to his manhood and his fidelity.

“Yes, Jack dear, it was a little lonesome.”  She was swinging in her hammock on the veranda in sight of the sea, and Jack sat by her with his cigar.  “I don’t mind telling you now that there were times when I longed for you dreadfully, but I was glad, all the same, that you were enjoying yourself, for it is tiresome down here for a man with nothing to do but to wait.”

“You dear thing!” said Jack, with his hand on her head, smoothing her glossy hair and pushing it back from her forehead, to make her look more intellectual—­a thing which she hated.  “Yes, dear, I was a brute to go off at all.”

“But you wanted to comeback?” And there was a wistful look in her eyes.

“Indeed I did,” he answered, fervently, as he leaned over the hammock to kiss the sweet eyes into content; and he was quite honest in the expression of a desire that was nearly forty-eight hours old, and by a singular mental reaction seemed to have been always present with him.