Well, even though she was so mean a person, so little and mean in her hidden self, perhaps she could do something to improve the outward girl. She could at least put on her hat, stand straight—not flattened against the rail like a weak piece of straw in the wind,—hold her chin up—her chin that was like her father’s, pointed, but firm. She pulled out the hat from one of the pockets of the tweed coat, pushed her blown hair up under its brim and pulled it well down on her head. It was a notable hat, once well on, and whatever it did for the inner girl, it certainly changed the whole air of the outer, visible girl. It was French felt of an exceptionally fine quality, and green, the shade of Bermuda waters when they are stillest. Her father had bought it for her one day in St. George’s. He said he had got it for a song at a stupid sale. It was one of the very few hats of her life, as it happened, because her father thought hats in general ridiculous and more suitable for monkeys than for men and women. But this hat was different. He realized that, when he caught it from the corner of his eye, passing the shop window. It sang Ariel. And he had got it for a “song.” But not the feather that was tacked to the brim, ruffling jewel notes in the wind. That had dropped _from_ a song, not been bought at all. He had picked it up on the beach almost at their door as he came back one afternoon, not many weeks ago, from what was to prove his last swim. No bird from which this feather could have dropped had ever been seen on the island, so far as any ornithologist knew. But here was the feather, in spite of that. It was magic, then. And it magic’d the hat. It pointed the fact that Ariel’s eyes, rather narrow, but nice friendly eyes, and free as the day from the malice that one sometimes detects even in the pleasantest children’s eyes, were as green as itself,—as green as Bermuda waters. Now those eyes had discerned one head that did top all the other heads on the approaching pier, and it very probably was Hugh’s. But she had decided last night, or early this morning—she had slept very little—that she would begin, at least, by calling him “Mr. Weyman.” For it was five years and a few months over since they had seen each other. His father too had died, since that far-away time, and he had left law school to become the support of his mother and younger brother and sister. At twenty-five, still a student without responsibilities, when they had entertained him at the studio, he had seemed a boy. But at thirty now, and having, as she had, encountered death, could he be the same at all, any more than she was the same fourteen-year-old girl that he must be remembering? She thought not; and whether she was shaking with chill from the March wind or from apprehension of change in her father’s friend, she did not know. But she was shaking, miserably, and a strand of hair had escaped again and was stinging her eyes. Chapter II