"What a ninny!" she whispered. "Was I sick with love, I wonder?" The harbor master answered with the motion of his oars. She glanced at him shrewdly, then struck her hands together at her breast, which she caused to rise and fall stormily. She was, in fact, a storm petrel in the guise of woman. "You have saved my life," she cried out, "when not another man in all this world would have lifted so much as his little finger. Do what you will with me after this. Let me be your slave, your dog--. I am a lost woman if you will not take pity on me." Rackby's heart came into his throat with the slow surge of a sculpin on a hook. "Nothing--. Nothing at all. Nothing in the world. I happened along--. Just a happen so." The girl stood up, looked at him long and long, cried, "Thank you for nothing, then, Mr. Happen-so," and from the humility of gratitude she went to the extreme of impudence, and laughed in his face--a ringing, brazen laugh, with the wild sweetness in it which he had noted in the song she sang on that November hillside. "You're a caution, little man, you're a caution," she said, slanting her lashes. "You certainly are. I've heard of you. Yes, I have, only this morning. I'm a solitary like yourself. See here. You and I could set the world on fire if we joined hands. Do you know that?" The little man was struck dumb at his oars for very fear of the boldness of her advance. He recognized this for an original and fearsome, not to say delectable, vein of talk. She came on like the sea itself, impetuous and all-embracing. Unfathomed, too. Could fancy itself construct a woman so, pat to his hand? "Is it true that you despise women as they say?" she whispered. She breathed close, and electrified the tip of his ear with a tendril of hair. He saw that she wore coral now, in place of the pearls. But her lips were redder than the coral. He raised his head. "Yesterday morning you sold pearls for the benefit of Sam Dreed," he said, in dull tones. "And here you are with your brimstone fairly in my boat." He looked at her as if the Old Roke himself had clambered into the boat, with his spell of doom. "I am not afraid of helping honest men in trouble that I know of," said Cad Sills, sucking in her lower lip. "But do you throw that up to me?" Jethro felt the wickedness of his position like a breath of fire fanning his cheek. Perilously tempted, he sagged back on the oars without a word. "Soho! you're setting me ashore," said that dark woman, laughing. "I don't wear very well in the eye and that's a plain conclusion." She laid a finger to her breast, and her eye mocked him. This brazen hardness put him from his half-formed purpose. He addressed himself to the oars, and the dory grated on the shore. "Good-bye, then, little man," she said, springing past him. But even now she lingered and looked back, biting the coral and letting it fall, intimating that a word, a whispered syllable, might lay her low.