The captain, to fill up the time, began to discuss the different makes of fishing-rods. Mr. Neckart was used to give ten minutes each to men seeking interviews: their words had to be sharp as arrows, and driven straight home to the bull's eye of the matter to command his attention. Yet he listened to this lazy talk. The damp wind drove the perfume of the apple-blossoms in at the open window: the sunlight touched the glistening rings of hair on Jane's throat. How slow-moving and calm the girl was! He was quite sure that the blood had flowed leisurely in the veins under that pearly skin ever since she was born. None of that true American vim, sparkle, pushing energy here which he admired in his countrywomen. "I really don't understand the new kinds of tackle," he said to Captain Swendon: "I have not had a rod in my hand for fifteen years." "No. Of course not. You have other work to do. But Jane and I run down to the shore whenever we have money--I mean whenever we can manage to leave home. She knows every fisherman's hut from Henlopen to Barnegat. No better place to go for a breath of salt air than Sutphen's Point. You can troll with him all day, or dig for roots in the pine woods, or sleep on the beach in the sun." Neckart smiled and glanced at his watch. At nine the committee would meet. Sun? Sleeping on the beach? He was a stout, strongly-built man, with muscles like steel, but, like most Americans who have urged their way relentlessly up, his brain before middle age gave signs of disease. As any other creature would, when overdriven for years it revolted, and failed in its work now and then. Night after night he lay sleepless, conscious only of a dull vacuity at the base of the brain; and by day, when some crisis demanded his most vigilant, keenest thought, thought suddenly blurred into momentary stupor. Any man who overworks his brain will understand how it was with him, and why, for physical reasons, this glimpse of absolute quiet and rest should touch his nerves as the taste of cordial would a fainting man. A sudden vision opened before him of yellow, silent sands, and dusky stretches of solemn pines, and the monotonous dash of the green sea all day, all night long. No doubt there were "old Sutphens" there, whole generations of people, outside of the living world, sleeping and sunning themselves. It was like a glimpse into some newly-discovered, silent, sunlit Hades.