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It was the latter he always feared, which formed his greatest hazard to tear from her the tendrils of the invidious past. The vague outline of the ruined wharf swam forward, and the tender slid into the comparative quiet of its partial protection. "Make fast," Woolfolk directed. "I shall be out of the boat for a while."
He was all pumped out. Missed his hand at first the dark a scratch." He rested on the oars, fingering his shoulder. The tender swung dangerously near the corrugated rock of the shore, and Woolfolk sharply directed: "Keep way on her." "Yes, sir," Halvard replied, once more swinging into his short, efficient stroke.
"Yes," he replied, "and I am returning immediately." "It was like magic!" she continued. "Suddenly, without a sound, you were anchored in the bay." Even this quiet statement bore the shadowy alarm. John Woolfolk realized that it had not been caused by his abrupt appearance; the faint accent of dread was fixed in the illusive form before him.
At times his inflexible integrity oppressed John Woolfolk. Halvard, he thought, was a difficult man to live up to. He turned and absently surveyed the land. His restlessness increased. He felt a strong desire for a larger freedom of space than that offered by the Gar, and it occurred to him that he might go ashore in the tender. He moved aft with this idea growing to a determination.
Nicholas stopped at the inner fringe of the beach and, from a point where he could not be seen from the ketch, stood gazing out at the Gar pounding on her long anchor chains. The man remained for an oppressively extended period; Woolfolk could see his heavy, drooping shoulders and sunken head; and then the other moved to the left, crossing the rough open behind the oleanders.
But Woolfolk saw that the other's fingers were crawling toward his pocket. He realized that the man's dully smiling mask concealed sultry, ungoverned emotions, blind springs of hate. Again on the ketch the inevitable reaction overtook him.
"If you will hold the rod," Woolfolk directed his companion, "I'll gaff him." She took the rod while he bent over the wharf's side. The fish, on the surface of the water, half turned; and, striking the gaff through a gill, Woolfolk swung him up on the boarding. "There," he pronounced, "are several dinners. I'll carry him to your kitchen."
Nicholas' arms were about his chest; he was endeavoring by sheer pressure to crush Woolfolk's opposition, when the latter injected a mounting wrath into the conflict. They spun in the open like a grotesque human top, and fell. Woolfolk was momentarily underneath, but he twisted lithely uppermost. He felt a heavy, blunt hand leave his arm and feel, in the dark, for his face.
Halvard busied himself with the shaking sails. "Really I'd rather you didn't," Millie gasped. "I must learn ... no longer a child." But Woolfolk held the ketch on her return course; his companion's panic was growing beyond her control. They passed once more between the broken waves and entered the still bay with its border of flowering earth.
There, when the yacht had been anchored, Millie sat gazing silently at the open sea whose bigness had so unexpectedly distressed her. Her face was pinched, her mouth set in a straight, hard line. That, somehow, suggested to Woolfolk the enigmatic governess; it was in contradiction to the rest.
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