On that night Jethro stole more than one look at the girl while she was getting supper. Of late, when she came near him, she adopted a beloved-old-fool style of treatment which was new to him.
She was more a woman than formerly, perhaps. He did not understand her whimsies. But still they had talked kindly to each other with their eyes. They communed in mysterious ways—by looks, by slight pressures, by the innumerable intuitions which had grown up, coral-wise, from the depths of silence.
But this intercourse was founded upon sympathy. That once gone, she became unfathomable and lost to him, as much so as if visible bonds had been severed.—
A certain terror possessed him at the waywardness she manifested. Evidently some concession must be made.
"Come," he said, turning her face toward him with a tremulous hand. "I will make you a little gift for your birthday. What shall it be?"
She stood still—then made the very gesture to her bosom and around her neck, which had already sent Peter scurrying landward.
The movement evoked a deadly chill in Rackby's heart. Was the past, then, to rise against him, and stretch out its bloodless hands to link with living ones? That sinister co-tenant he had seen peering at him through the blue eyes would get the better of him yet.
Conscious of his mood, she leaped away from him like a fawn. A guilty light was in her eye, and she ran out of the house.
Rackby followed her in terror, not knowing which way to go in the lonely darkness to come up with her. In his turn he remembered the man who had tried to keep wild foxes on Meteor.
The harbor was calm, wondrous calm, with that blackness in the water which always precedes the rigor mortis of winter itself. All calm, all in order—not a ship of all those ships displaying riding lights to transgress the harbor lines he had decreed. How, then, should his own house not be in order?