So he had stood--so he had been touched. His heart beat fast, and now he stood under the Preaching Tree again, and drew a whiff of warm hay, clover-spiced, as it went creaking past, a square-topped load, swishing and dropping fragrant tufts.--This odor haunted him, as if delights forgotten, only dreamed, or enjoyed in other lives, had drifted past him.--Then the vivid touch of Cad Sills's lips. He glanced up, and at once his oars stumbled, and he nearly dropped them in his fright. For the fraction of a second he had, it seemed, surprised Cad Sills herself looking at him steadily out of those blue, half-shut lazy eyes of his scrupulously guarded foster child. The flesh cringed on his body. Was she lurking there still? Certainly he had felt again, in that flash, the kiss, the warm tumult of her body, the fingers dove-tailed across his eyes; and even seen the scented hay draw past him, toppling and quivering. He stared more closely at the girl. She looked nothing like the wild mother. There was no hint of Cad Sills in that golden beauty unless, perhaps, in a certain charming bluntness of sculpturing at the very tip of her nose, a deft touch. Nevertheless, some invisible fury had beat him about the head with her wings there in the bright sunshine. Disquieted, he resumed the oars. They had drifted close to the bank, and a shower of maple leaves, waxen red, all but fell into the boat. "These die as the young die," thought the harbor master, sadly. "They delight to go, these adventurers, swooping down at a breath. They are not afraid of the mystery of mold." His glance returned to the wandlike form of his daughter, whose eyes now opened upon his archly. "So she would adventure death," he reflected. "Almost at as light a whisper from the powers of darkness, too." They were no sooner ashore than the girl tugged at his hand to stay him. The jeweler's glass front had intrigued her eye, for there, displayed against canary plush, was a string of pearls, like winter moons for size and luster. Her speaking eye flashed on them and her slim fingers twisted and untwisted at her back. She lifted her head and with her forefinger traced a pleading circle round her throat. A dark cloud came over Rackby's features. These were the pearls, he knew at once, which Caddie Sills had sold in the interest of Cap'n Dreed so long ago. They were a luckless purchase on the part of the jeweler. All the women were agreed that such pearls had bad luck somewhere on the string, and no one had been found to buy. "Why does he display them at this time of all times, in the face and eyes of everybody?" thought the harbor master. A laugh sounded behind him. It was Deep-water Peter, holding a gun in one hand, and a dead sheldrake in the other. The red wall of the Customs House bulged over him. "Ah, there, Jethro!" he said. "Have you married the sea at last and taken a mermaid home to live?"