A thousand vague conjectures, romantic, fearsome, surged within me. Ships drawn under. Ships, always food-laden. And queerly hovering in my mind was the persisting crazy impression of that girl’s tangled tresses--like seaweed. I found myself waking up one night from a dream. A girl with glowing green eyes, and tangled flowing tresses like seaweed, was singing softly; and the song swept me with a trembling desire. Arturo was more silent than ever for the rest of the voyage. I tried to discuss the thing with him. He shut me up sharply. “Father will want to see us. You can talk about it then.” We were on time picking up the channel lights of our home port. Following close along the bottom, we cruised in between the two beacons of the twenty-fathom depth. The old man was beside me. He gestured toward our beacon chart. “Those lights, Jeff, are at twenty fathoms, low tide. You and I know it as well as we know our names. But look at them!” We were passing level with the caisson. Twenty fathoms! This was low tide now, and it did not need the special danger bulletins which had been flashed to us at every port all the way from Java, to warn us that something was wrong. Twenty fathoms? There were barely ten! Arturo and I transshipped to the continental passenger liner; and again at New York we took the Rekjavik Local Mail, with first stop at Portland. Polly met us at the Portland landing stage. “I’ve our plane here. Come on.” She kissed Arturo and gave me her hand. “You’re safe! We’ve been rather worried, until we got your landing message.” Arturo’s sister was a year older than he--at this time, nineteen. As different from Arturo as a sister well could be. She was a practical little person; there was nothing of the ineffectual dreamer about Polly Plantet. They were distant relatives of mine, and I had known Polly since she was ten. We called her then, “Roly Poly”; a chunky little girl, with a round moon-face and long chestnut curls. I recall how she hated the nickname; but, instead of crying, she dashed at us boys, fighting us with flailing little fists. At nineteen her “moon-face” had lengthened; but it was still solidly practical. Her figure was not chunky now, but even the most lavish flatterer would never have called her willowy. A solidly wholesome, determined little thing this Polly Plantet. Quiet of demeanor, purposeful, yet withal tempered by a feminine softness. In stature she was something around five feet. Vigorously healthy, she seemed to me the very personification of healthy, normal young womanhood. * * * * * Dr. Plantet’s wife had died when Arturo still was in infancy. They had lived then in Martinique, where the children were born. A mixed heritage: Dr. Plantet Anglo-Saxon--his wife Latin, with both French and Spanish mingled in her. Polly was so like her father that one could never mistake them, while Arturo was romantically Latin.