[Pg 46]

[Pg 46]

Shine, who had artistic responses, had long learned not to intrude them on the uninitiated.

“I guess he liked it wild,” he suggested, and lit a cigarette.

“But it looks so rough, not a flower bed or a vase—just paths. That one there,” she pointed to a path that skirted the side of the house and dipped to a small grove of pines below, “goes through those pines and up to that summer-house. Nothing on the way and what’s the summer-house when you get there? Old style rustic work with vines. You’d suppose he’d build a temple and have some marble benches round. The way the rich spend their money always gets me.”

Shine had been in the grove of pines, a growth of stunted trees filling in a hollow. He had followed the path through it, up the slope to the summer-house and beyond to where the bluff dropped away in a sheer cliff to the channel. They called the place “The Point” as it projected beyond the shore line in a rocky outthrust shoulder, gulls circling about it, water seething below. [Pg 47]He looked there now, let his glance slip along the curve of headlands till it reached the two girls, perched on a boulder like a pair of bright-plumaged birds. He was thinking how to approach the matter in his mind, when Mrs. Cornell went on:

[Pg 47]

“I don’t see what any one wanted to build a house here for—cut off this way. It’s too lonesome. With the tide at the full as it is now you can’t get ashore without a motor-boat. You know that current’s something fierce.”

He looked down at it, its rushing corded surface purple dark:

“Looks to be some current.”

“It would carry you out and ‘Good night’ to you. Gabriel who runs the launch told me. Set’s right out to sea someway. And the rise and fall to it—I couldn’t tell you how many feet it is, but you’ll see for yourself to-night if you’re awake—all the channel bare, nothing but rocks and mud. And across the middle of it to Hayworth, a causeway. That’s the only way you can get ashore at low tide. High or low you’re pretty [Pg 48]well marooned. It’s seclusion all right if that’s what you’re after.”

[Pg 48]

Shine was after information and with the talk running on tides and causeways he saw no chance of 

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