Hall went away. Rod watched him follow alongshore after Isabel. They disappeared together over a mossy point. His glance came back along the booming ground, followed the shore. Rod junior played on the gravel with the small son of a hook-tender and the equally small daughter of a high-rigger. A dozen houses where married men lived with their families faced that strip of shore. Clothes fluttered from taut lines. It neared five o'clock. Supper fires flung blue pennants from various chimneys. Over in the messhouse a flunky sang at his work and dishes clinked. From far up on the wooded slopes came shrill whistle blasts, the throb of machinery, all muffled in the deep cool forest over which was spreading a blight of raw stumps, broken branches, a litter of destruction. He went into the house. Mary sat with a few letters in her lap, the gleanings of that steamer's mail. She looked up at him expectantly. He shook his head. "Can't tell yet where we'll come out," he said. "It's getting to be a sort of a nightmare with you, isn't it, Rod?" she said wistfully. "The whole thing." "Oh, well," he replied absently, "another year, maybe sooner, it'll be finished--win, lose, or draw." He lit a cigarette, drew a whiff or two, sat with it forgotten in his fingers till the stub burned him. The long quitting blast went echoing up and down the channel. Men came pouring off the hill. The supper gong clanged, a prolonged and resonant metallic vibration, like an anvil under quick strokes of a hammer. Rod and his wife and boy walked to the small dining room set apart for their use. And still Andy and Isabel remained somewhere beyond that mossy point jutting like a green tongue into the sea. Not until Rod and his wife were back on the porch and the last logger long since smoking in the bunk house amid a drone of talk did the twain appear. Andy walked straight on to the camp. Isabel perched herself on the top step. She regarded them with a heightened color, an obvious repression, a look in her eyes as if she had beheld wonders. Mary looked after Andy, back at Isabel. "I'll go along to keep you company," she suggested. "I'm not the least bit hungry." "Are you ill?" Mary inquired teasingly. Isabel shook her head until the bobbed yellow hair stood out like an aureole. "I never felt better in my life," she declared. "I shouldn't be surprised," Rod ventured, "if you acted on the suggestion I made a few days ago." Isabel looked blank for a second. Then she remembered. "I didn't have to, Mr. Roderick," she said defiantly. "So there." "Ah," Rod declared. "I perceive something has happened." "Sagacious man," Isabel retorted. "Marvel of penetration, aren't you? What do you suppose happened, now?" "Tell us," Mary suggested. "You're bursting with something." Isabel arose, spread wide her short skirt, made an elaborate curtsey.