"Good night." His answer was very low. "Good night." But he didn't spend a good night. The longer he thought of it the more sinister and dangerous he felt his position. At last he squarely faced the fact that his desire for Nan had increased a hundred-fold by the fact that he had lost her, and that it might become a dangerous mania under the conditions of physical nearness which this little schooner made inevitable. As he sat in the darkness in his stateroom he could hear every sound in the adjoining one which she occupied as plainly as if the thin panelling of wood were not between them. He was a fool to be caught in such a trap! His love had been too big and serious a tragedy to end in a vulgar intrigue. There was something painful and stupefying in the spell which she threw over his senses. He realized, too, that she had put him practically at her mercy by the promise he had given. And what made it all the more dangerous was that she was sincere, and apparently sure of herself. He made up his mind to cut his trip short on some pretext, and in the meantime he would devote himself faithfully to an attempt to start Bivens on the road to a recovery of his shattered health. At eight o'clock the next morning the black nose of the _Buccaneer_ slowly felt her way into Hog Island Inlet on the shores of old Virginia and dropped her anchor in the deep waters of the channel back of the sand spit on which the U.S. Life Saving station is built. As Stuart stepped on deck a great flock of thousands of brant swept in from sea and pitched on the bar beyond the channel. A cloud of black ducks circled gracefully overhead and slowly spread out on their feeding grounds beyond the brant. His heart gave a throb of primitive joy. He was a boy again, and the world was young. "Confound them!" he cried. "I'll show these ducks a trick or two before this trip is over." He was glad he came. To the devil with worry and women and all the problems of the universe! He watched the flight of the birds for half an hour, entranced with the memories they evoked. He made up his mind to stay the whole month out and get even with them for a hundred bitter disappointments they had given him in the past. The long gleaming sweep of the Broadwater Bay, stretching from the tip of the Cape Charles peninsula to the mouth of the Delaware, was literally alive with ducks. Bivens had put him in command of the little schooner and he gave orders at once to lower a tender and tow her to an old anchorage he knew in a little cove behind Gull Marsh. And then his trouble began with Bivens. Stuart rushed to his stateroom and described the prospects of a great day in the blinds with boyish enthusiasm. It didn't move Bivens, except to rage. "Let 'em fly if they want to, I'm not going to budge. Go yourself, Jim." Stuart was furious, and began to talk to Bivens as if he were a schoolboy.