"My yacht stayed a few days at Fortune's Bay," he said. "While there I heard that Dorian Mountcastle's yacht had been there before me. Dorian had been recovering slowly from the wound I gave him, and he had not been told of the tragic death of his wife. When it could be kept from him no longer the truth was broken to him gently, but it almost bereft him of reason. The last I heard of him was that his friends had taken him abroad for a year to recuperate his health." He went down to Pirate Beach to see the Courtneys, who were very gracious. Azalea had almost given up all hope of ever winning Dorian, and she tried all her fascinations on Donald Kayne. But he was cold, taciturn and moody, and had no interest in anything except the mystery that had brought him to Pirate Beach--the mystery of Nita Farnham's possession of the serpent ring. But in spite of Azalea's efforts she had nothing to tell him, beyond what she had written him before the duel. "And yet, I believe," she said, "that the old fortune-teller, who lives in an old boat-cabin down the beach, knows more about Nita than the most of us. I have talked with her, and she is very mysterious. She would neither admit nor deny any knowledge of Nita, but if I had not been too poor to bribe her I believe she would have given me some information." Donald Kayne sought Meg Dineheart at sunset, and found her standing alone in the strange purple glow by the sea, a weird, witchlike figure, with elf-locks streaming on the breeze, while she shaded her eyes with her hand and strained her gaze across the darkening waters, watching, as she was always watching now, for her son's bark to come sailing home. She turned upon the intruder with a curse, but Azalea had been right in believing that gold would loosen the old harpy's tongue. Kayne soon learned that Nita had been reared at Pirate Beach by the old fortune-teller, until at the age of fifteen she had run away to make her own living at the metropolis. "What is the girl to you?" asked Donald Kayne, but she leered and refused to reply. "And the serpent ring she wore? I will make your fortune, old woman, if you will tell me how Nita Farnham came by that ring," he exclaimed eagerly. Bitterly did Meg regret that she could not gratify his curiosity. "I know nothing of the ring, except that I saw it on Nita's hand before she went away on Mountcastle's yacht. Stay--you say there is but one ring like it in the world? Then I saw the same ring more than fourteen years ago on another woman's hand." "You saw her? Where? Where, woman?" he cried in fierce excitement. The old witch peered curiously into the face of her interlocutor. Donald Kayne's face was wild and haggard. Unconsciously to himself, in his wild excitement, he stretched out his hand and clutched the woman's shoulder in a grasp that was painful.