It was a cold, blustery morning, with a high, whistling wind coming in from the Gulf. The sky was clear and blue as a mid-summer's day and the sun was shining as if it had never had a chance to shine before. It was with difficulty that I got into my boat without suffering a wetting, but I was soon bobbing on the crest of the waves or lying in the troughs of the pale-green, almost transparent sea, making my way across the Bay, as the waves climbed higher and still higher, with white-maned horses racing in on top of the flowing tide. It was hard pulling, but I was strong and reckless, fearing neither man nor elements. Every minute of that forenoon brought with it an increasing fury of the storm; every minute greater volumes of water lashed and dashed into the Bay, until, away out, The Ghoul looked more like a waterspout than a black, forbidding rock. Rita was surprised and angry at my daring in crossing, yet she could not disguise her pleasure now I was with her, for she chafed with the restrictions of a stormy winter and craved, as all healthy people do, for the society of those of her own age. "Seems as if it's goin' to be a hurricane," remarked old Andrew Clark, looking out across the upheaving waters. "Never saw it so bad;--yet it's only comin' on. "Guess you'll ha'e to stop wi' us the night, George." "--And welcome," put in his good lady. "There's always a spare bed for George Bremner in this house. Eh! Andrew." "Ay,--ay!" remarked the old man, reflectively. "We're no' havin' ye drooned goin' away frae this place,--that I'm tellin' ye." Like me, Rita was a child of stress and storm. She loved to feel the strong wind in her face and hair. She gloried in the taste of the salt spray. She thrived in the open and sported in the free play of her agile limbs. Unafraid, and daring to recklessness, nothing seemed to daunt her; nothing, unless, maybe, it were the great, cruel, sharks' teeth of The Ghoul over which the sea was now breaking, away out there at the entrance to the Bay: that rock upon which she had been wrecked in her childhood; that relentless, devilish thing that had robbed her of her mother and of her birthright. Even then, as she and I scampered and scrambled along the shore line, over the rocks and headlands,--whenever she gazed out there I fancied I detected a shudder passing over her. For an hour, with nothing to do but pass the time, we kept on and on, along the shore, until we reached Neil Andrews' little house on the far horn of the Crescent, standing out on the cliffs. We stood on the highest rock, in front of the old fisherman's dwelling, watching the huge waves rolling in and breaking on the headlands with deafening thundering, showering us with rainbow sprays and swallowing up the sounds of our voices.