"In the meantime," she caught him up, "please don't speak to me. And please sit in the other end of the boat, if you don't mind. The air will be easier to breathe if—"
"Certainly," he assented, making his way to the far end of the launch, while she seized the neglected steering wheel again. "And I am sorrier than I can say, that I have had to tell you all this. If it were not that you must know it, soon, anyway, I'd have bitten my tongue out, sooner than make you so unhappy. Please believe that, won't you?"
There was an earnest depth of contrition in his voice that checked the icy retort she had been about to make. And, emboldened by her silence, he went on:
"Hade needed your brother and the use of your brother's house and land. He needed them, imperatively, for the scheme he was trying to swing …. That was why he got Standish into his power, in the first place. That was why he forced or wheedled him into this partnership. The Standish house was built, in its original form, more than a hundred years ago. In the days when Dade County and all this end of Florida were in hourly dread of Seminole raids from the Everglade country, and where every settler's house must be not only his castle, but—"
"I'm sorry to have to remind you," she broke in, freezingly, "that I asked you not to speak to me. Surely you can have at least that much chivalry,—when I am helpless to get out of hearing from you. You say you are willing to confront my brother with, this—this—ridiculous charge. Very well. Till then, I hope you won't—"
"All right," he said, gloomily. "And I don't blame you. I'm a bungler, when it comes to saying things to women. I don't know so very much about them. I've read that no man really understands women. And certainly I don't. By the way, the boat's run opposite that spit of beach at the bottom of your mangrove swamp. If you're in a hurry, you can land there, and we can go to the house by way of the hidden path. It will cut off a mile or so. You have a flashlight. So—"
He let his voice trail away, frozen to silence by the rigidly hostile little figure outlined at the other end of the boat by the tumble of phosphorus in their wake.
Claire roused herself, from a gloomy reverie, enough to shift the course of the craft and to head it for the dim-seen sandspit that was backed by the ebony darkness of the mangrove swamp.
Neither of them spoke again, until, with a swishing sound and a soft grate of the light-draught boat, the keel clove its way into the offshore sand and the craft came to coughing halt twenty feet from land.
Claire roused herself, from a gloomy reverie in which she had fallen. Subconsciously, she had accepted the man's suggestion that they take the short cut. And she had steered thither, forgetful that there was no dock and no suitable landing place for even so light a boat anywhere along the patch of sandy foreshore.