The boy’s mother had just left him, with permission to stay until the toy was finished. She felt the increasing dampness in the air, but she stopped at her gate, shrinking from the silence of the house, and looked back to the group at the fire. Presently she turned and walked slowly in the direction of the old hotel. The swell broke with a long tramp and swash at the foot of the bluff, for it was flood-tide. In dark places, where the water ruffled about the piers, there were flashes of phosphorous light. Louise watched it, leaning from the railing. It was a light she loved. She liked, too, those night voices of the sea. They intruded on her loneliness with a mild insistence; in sympathy, yet expostulation. But it was at such times she most excused Philip. "Men seldom are as constant as women," she told herself. "Marriage to them can never mean as much. Our work, our whole living must hinge on it; every hour is shaped to it; but with them it is only a halt at the end of the day." She lifted her glance and started erect. She brushed her clouding eyes and stood staring out into the thick atmosphere. Something loomed there from the sea. It was the bowsprit and forward rigging of a small vessel, close in beyond the walls of the ruin. There was a familiar dip in the lines of the loosely furled jib. "The _Phantom_," she exclaimed. "She has missed the landing in the smoke." And she hurried up the approach to the front entrance and on through the empty bar-room to the rear balcony. But the hail that sprang to her lips failed, and she shrank back into the shadow of the interior. This craft carried no lights. There was no stir of landing; none of the excitement of going unintentionally aground. Instead there was a great hush, strange, sinister. Then, while Louise wavered, afraid of she knew not what, a tender pushed out from the side, and was pulled with muffled oars to the ruin. She heard the bow touch the piling, and the two men in her stood up, head and shoulders above the platform. But the light was too uncertain for her to determine whether or not one was Philip, and she withdrew farther into the room. They lifted some bulky object, apparently a trunk, up to the balcony, She lacked the courage to stay and meet them, and she ran softly through to the walk, but there she wavered again. It flashed over her that if this were not Philip it might mean some peril to the mills; something that Forrest should know about. She went back and concealed herself behind the bar. It was very dark there, and she dropped to her knees, creeping under and drawing her skirts close.