"I'm going to the breakwater with Johnny Deutra tonight," said Deolda, in that awful truthful way of hers.
"You see what you get," said my aunt, "if you marry that girl."
"I'll get worse not marrying her," said Conboy. "I may die any minute; I've a high blood pressure, and maybe a stroke will carry me off any day. But I've never wanted anything in many years as I want to hold Deolda in my arms."
"Shame on you!" cried my aunt. "An old man like you!"
So things went on. Johnny kept right on coming. My aunt would fume about it, but she did nothing. We were all under Deolda's enchantment. As for me, I adored her; she had a look that always disarmed me. She would sit brooding with a look I had come to know as the "Deolda look." Tears would come to her eyes and slide down her face.
"Deolda," I would plead, "what are you crying about?"
"Life," she answered.
But I knew that she was crying because Johnny Deutra was only a boy. Then she would change into a mood of wild gayety, whip the shawl around her, and dance for me, looking a thousand times more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen. And then she would shove me out of the room, leaving me feeling as though I had witnessed some strange rite at once beautiful and unholy.
She'd sit mocking Conboy, but he'd only smile. She'd go off with her other love and my aunt powerless to stop her. As for Johnny Deutra, he was so in love that all he saw was Deolda. I don't believe he ever thought that she was in earnest about old Conboy.
So things stood when one day Capt. Mark Hammar came driving up with Conboy to take Deolda out. Mark was his real name, but Nick was what they called him, after the "Old Nick," for he was a devil if there ever was one, a big, rollicking devil—that is, outwardly. But gossips said no crueller man ever drove a crew for the third summer into the Northern Seas. I didn't like the way he looked at Deolda from the first, with his narrowed eyes and his smiling mouth. My aunt didn't like the way she signaled back to him. We watched them go, my aunt saying