“My dear little woman,"’ he began, “to tell you the truth, I never laid eyes on Morton; didn’t want to, in fact.  All that was an excuse to get away.  I thought you wanted a rest, and I went away to let you have it.  Miss Billeton I haven’t seen for three months, and couldn’t if I would, for she is engaged to her cousin and is now in Paris buying her wedding clothes.  I don’t know who has been humbugging you, but they’ve done it very badly.  There is not one word of truth in what you’ve said from beginning to end.”

There is a certain ring in a truthful statement that overcomes all doubts.  Lucy felt this before Max had finished.  She felt, too, with a sudden thrill, that she still held him.  Then there came the instantaneous desire to wipe out all traces of the outburst and keep his good-will.

“And you swear it?” she asked, her belief already asserting itself in her tones, her voice falling to its old seductive pitch.

“On my honor as a man,” he answered simply.

For a time she remained silent, her mind working behind her mask of eyes and lips, the setting sun slanting across the beach and lighting up her face and hair, the grays splashing the suds with their impatient feet.  Max kept his gaze upon her.  He saw that the outbreak was over and that she was a little ashamed of her tirade.  He saw, too, man of the world as he was, that she was casting about in her mind for some way in which she could regain for herself her old position without too much humiliation.

“Don’t say another word, little woman,” he said in his kindest tone.  “You didn’t mean a word of it; you haven’t been well lately, and I oughtn’t to have left you.  Tighten up your reins; we’ll drive on if you don’t mind.”

That night after the moon had set and the lights had been turned out along the boardwalk and the upper and lower porticos and all Beach Haven had turned in for the night, and Lucy had gone to her apartments, and Mr. and Mrs. Coates and the rest of them, single and double, were asleep, Max, who had been pacing up and down his dressing-room, stopped suddenly before his mirror, and lifting the shade from the lamp, made a critical examination of his face.

“Forty, and I look it!” he said, pinching his chin with his thumb and forefinger, and turning his cheek so that the light would fall on the few gray hairs about his temples.  “That beggar Miggs said so yesterday at the club.  By gad, how pretty she was, and how her eyes snapped!  I didn’t think it was in her!”

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SWEDE’S STORY

Captain Holt had selected his crew—­picked surfmen, every one of them—­and the chief of the bureau had endorsed the list without comment or inquiry.  The captain’s own appointment as keeper of the new Life-Saving Station was due as much to his knowledge of men as to his skill as a seaman, and so when his list was sent in—­men he said he could “vouch for”—­it took but a moment for the chief to write “Approved” across its face.