"Good!" said her father. "Now you'll feel better!"
II
IT was dark when they sighted the yellow lantern light on Martha's Island. Darkness drops down so suddenly in the far south! It's rather spooky! Rather a nice spooky, though, if you happen to be a reasonably innocent Northerner looking for thrills. It's only poor souls like Lost Man and the Outlaw, and perhaps even Martha herself, to whom Darkness symbolizes a stab in the back, a shot from ambush, or God knows what!
To Daphne, this night, the darkness was all a-tingle with magic and pain. High overhead in ineffable crispness the blue-black dome of the sky seemed fairly crackling with stars. Close around her in murky mystery the great Gulf chuckled and prattled of coral and pearl. From the dark, huddled group in the stern of the boat not a face or a feature flared familiarly to hers. And drowned in the shuddering gasp and throb of the engine her 150 father's deep-voiced raillery, even the Brown Khaki Lady's light laughter, sounded like something from another world.
It was Daphne's own little world that concerned her most at that moment, a world in chaos!
"My father is false to me!" mutinied her wild little heart. "He has deceived me! And about a lady!" woke jealousy. "We didn't need another lady! And what earthly reason could two people have for pretending to be strangers when they really were lovers? But how could two people possibly be lovers," she questioned suddenly with an entirely new stab of bewilderment and pain, "if one of them was already married to somebody else? If one of them indeed was actually on a honeymoon? Even though at the particular moment she might have run away from her honeymoon? Marriage was marriage, people said! You had to play it fair! Everybody had to play it fair! It was like a game! Even people who cheated in business wouldn't think of cheating in games! It wasn't good sportsmanship! It wasn't——" Feverishly her fancy quickened and raged at all its pulses. "If my father 151 isn't good," she tortured, "who is good? If my father isn't good, what is good? If my father isn't good—what's the use of anybody being good?"
Defiantly she lifted her eyes to the stars. And the stars laughed at her! Distractedly she turned her ear to the Gulf and heard the Gulf nudging the poor old launch in its ribs!
Then like the bumpy end of a dream, infinitely alarming, irresistibly awakening, the little launch snubbed its nose into wood in stead of a wave, and the voyage was over!
Gracing the upper step of a peculiarly water-logged and dilapidated looking pier the yellow lantern flared down its wan welcome to the voyagers' eyes. There was not a soul in sight, nor any sign of human habitation except the lantern and the ruined pier.