“Ah, yes,” he muttered; “just so.”
The flush receded from his indeterminate countenance. Woolfolk saw that he had a goatee laid like a wasted yellow finger on his chin, and that his hands hung on wrists like twisted copper wires from circular cuffs fastened with large mosaic buttons.
“We are alone here,” he proceeded in a fluctuating voice, the voice of a shadow; “the man is away. My daughter—I—” He grew inaudible, although his lips maintained a faint movement.
The fear that lurked illusively in the daughter was in the parent magnified to an appalling panic, an instinctive, acute agony that had crushed everything but a thin, tormented spark of life. He passed his hand over a brow as dry as the spongy limbs of the cypress, brushing a scant lock like dead, bleached moss.
“The fish,” he pronounced; “yes ... acceptable.”
“If you will carry it back for me,” Millie Stope requested; “we have no ice; I must put it in water.” He followed her about a bay window with ornamental fretting that bore the shreds of old, variegated paint. He could see, amid an incongruous wreckage within, a dismantled billiard table, its torn cloth faintly green beneath a film of dust. They turned and arrived at the kitchen door. “There, please.” She indicated a bench on the outside wall, and he deposited his burden.
“You have been very nice,” she told him, making her phrase less commonplace by a glance of her wide, appealing eyes. “Now, I suppose, you will go on across the world?”
“Not tonight,” he replied distantly.
“Perhaps, then, you will come ashore again. We see so few people. My father would be benefited. It was only at first, so suddenly—he was startled.”
“There is a great deal to do on the ketch,” he replied indirectly, maintaining his retreat from the slightest advance of life. “I came ashore to discover if you had a large water supply and if I might fill my casks.”