He avoided the seat by the side of Miss Moorsom. The others were talking together languidly. Unnoticed he looked at that woman so marvellous that centuries seemed to lie between them. He was oppressed and overcome at the thought of what she could give to some man who really would be a force! What a glorious struggle with this amazon. What noble burden for the victorious strength. Dear old Mrs. Dunster was dispensing tea, looking from time to time with interest towards Miss Moorsom. The aged statesman having eaten a raw tomato and drunk a glass of milk (a habit of his early farming days, long before politics, when, pioneer of wheat-growing, he demonstrated the possibility of raising crops on ground looking barren enough to discourage a magician), smoothed his white beard, and struck lightly Renouard’s knee with his big wrinkled hand. “You had better come back to-night and dine with us quietly.” He liked this young man, a pioneer, too, in more than one direction. Mrs. Dunster added: “Do. It will be very quiet. I don’t even know if Willie will be home for dinner.” Renouard murmured his thanks, and left the terrace to go on board the schooner. While lingering in the drawing-room doorway he heard the resonant voice of old Dunster uttering oracularly— “. . . the leading man here some day. . . . Like me.” Renouard let the thin summer portière of the doorway fall behind him. The voice of Professor Moorsom said— “I am told that he has made an enemy of almost every man who had to work with him.” “That’s nothing. He did his work. . . . Like me.” “He never counted the cost they say. Not even of lives.” Renouard understood that they were talking of him. Before he could move away, Mrs. Dunster struck in placidly— “Don’t let yourself be shocked by the tales you may hear of him, my dear. Most of it is envy.” Then he heard Miss Moorsom’s voice replying to the old lady— “Oh! I am not easily deceived. I think I may say I have an instinct for truth.” He hastened away from that house with his heart full of dread. CHAPTER VI On board the schooner, lying on the settee on his back with the knuckles of his hands pressed over his eyes, he made up his mind that he would not return to that house for dinner—that he would never go back there any more. He made up his mind some twenty times. The knowledge that he had only to go up on the quarter deck, utter quietly the words: “Man the windlass,” and that the schooner springing into life would run a hundred miles out to sea before sunrise, deceived his struggling will. Nothing easier! Yet, in the end, this young man, almost ill-famed for his ruthless daring, the inflexible leader of two tragically successful expeditions, shrank from that act of savage energy, and began, instead, to hunt for excuses.