Perilously tempted, he sagged back on the oars without a
word.
"Soho! you're setting me ashore," said that dark woman, laughing. "I
don't wear very well in the eye and that's a plain conclusion."
She laid a finger to her breast, and her eye mocked him. This brazen
hardness put him from his half-formed purpose. He addressed himself to
the oars, and the dory grated on the shore.
"Good-bye, then, little man," she said, springing past him.
But even now she lingered and looked back, biting the coral and letting
it fall, intimating that a word, a whispered syllable, might lay her
low.
He sat like a man crushed to earth. When he raised his head she was
gone.
Was this the voice from the seaward side of Meteor? True, the sea had
yielded this wild being up, but did she speak with the sea's voice? She
had at least the sea's inconstancy, the sea's abandonment.
Her words were hot and heavy in little Rackby's heart. Serene harbor
master that he was, the unearthly quiet of his harbor was an affront
upon him in his present mood. Now that she was lost to him, he could
not, by any makeshift of reason, be rid of the impulse that had come
upon him to jump fairly out of his own skin in an effort to recapture
that tormenting woman--.
He drifted down upon Meteor Island, bowed and self-reproachful, like a
spirit approaching the confines of the dead.
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