Even if he had felt free to tell her, he could hardly have explained what was amiss. A heavy feeling in the air, a queer thrill inside him, a vague sensation that something big, too big to understand, was about to happen: could one call that “something wrong”? Billy hardly thought so and therefore kept silent.
Sally moved about uneasily for a little while, got up, seated herself again, then finally jumped up once more.
“I can’t keep still, Billy Wentworth, and no more can you,” she announced. “Let’s go down on the beach.”
They went down over the sparse sea-grass, across the smooth water-worn rocks to the beach, left hard and wet by the receding tide.
For a short time they walked on the sand without speaking. The winter storms had washed up quantities of driftwood that now lay, dry and bleached white, in tumbled heaps here and there above high water mark. The two sat down by one of them at last, when they became weary of tramping up and down. Suddenly Sally lifted her head to listen.
“Why does the bell-buoy ring louder?” she questioned.
It was true that the far-off clanging voice sounded clearer, all at once; it rang loud and steady through the quiet night for a moment, then dropped again to the faint, intermittent “clang-clang-clang,” to which Billy had listened all the afternoon.
“What could ring it like that?” he was asking himself, but even while he was so thinking the answer came to him. The waves of a passing steamer would rock the buoy for just that length of time, setting it to calling louder through the windless silence. They sat waiting and by and by heard a sharp swish, swish, as a succession of heavier swells broke upon the sandy beach. Yes, it must have been a steamer, coming close in, under cover of the dark. What was she? The shore boat?
No, that had been lying at the wharf for an hour. The Boston steamer? That was not yet running. Could she be a certain white yacht of clean-cut, racing lines, the one that had slipped by Appledore in the fog, that night of the adventure at the mill, the one that had passed the Island three times already that day?
“I think I had better tell Captain Saulsby,” Billy said.