He found a small sailboat which he could hire. The wind was just right, and he started. It seemed to him that he did not look to the right or left as his boat glided down between the Florida bank and the shore of Anastasia Island. The soft air was sweet with the smells of pine woods and salt water. The white gulls flew over him; the marsh ponies galloped up to the brink of the river to look at him, then as he came nearer they snorted and galloped away again, mane and tail flying. It was several hours before his craft sailed up to the rickety old wharf near the ruin of the Spanish fort. Two or three people were strolling on the beach, poking the fiddler-crabs with canes, or looking idly off about them. "Hullo, Lawrence; so you decided you'd come, after all, eh?" "Yes; thought better of it when I found I got back from Jacksonville in time." Lawrence would not ask concerning his wife. A burning pain seemed to have seized his heart. He had not eaten since morning, and then but a few morsels of food. He was obliged to battle against a certain tremor of the limbs that sometimes came upon him. He walked along among the fiddler-crabs that were everywhere darting into their holes and then coming out again. He examined these crabs as if they were of the greatest interest to him. He talked a great deal with the people he met. Two or three of them spoke afterwards of his appearance, and some averred that there was a peculiar expression in his eyes. But there are people who make use of such phrases after a thing has happened. CHAPTER XIII. AN INVOLUNTARY BATH. Strolling thus in front of the old house with its big chimneys and verandas, Lawrence thought he would go and sit down on one of those verandas: people who saw him would suppose he was enjoying the scenery, and he was conscious of an imperative desire to think calmly. That was what he had been trying to do all the way down here,--think calmly. He called himself an idiot, an unmitigated idiot, for coming at all. How should he better things by coming? He rose from the old bench on which he had been sitting, and walked around the corner of the house. Walking, thus, he came upon a man and a woman standing there within the shade of some thick clambering vines. The man's back was towards Lawrence but the woman's face was plain to his sight, with upraised eyes and--he could not be sure of the expression, for Prudence instantly advanced, saying, briskly: "So nice of you, Rodney, to come, after all. Mr. Meramble was just suggesting that we go back to the launch and take a turn outside and see where Menendez and his ruffians came in." "Capital idea," responded Lawrence, a trifle too pleasantly. "I always thought Menendez was rather overestimated as a scamp. You remember we looked the whole thing up when we came to Augustine, Prudence?"