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felt a bit like a schoolgirl who had been handed her first bunch of flowers by a boy. She wondered how much of this odd excitement was caused by being flustered by his reputation? Such a man, with the name he had in sail, would naturally awe her somewhat.
    She had lived in sail substantially all of her life, as she had told him, and had loved it. She loved it still. It was quite probable that this facet of her would not change. Even during the period of her marriage to Paul the sea had been a part of her life. She and Paul had lived on a sailboat. So neither marriage nor her child—and, if one wanted to guess at the future, another possible marriage and its resultant possible children—would be likely to alter the influence of sail and the sea. These would always be a part of her life. And this man, Most, was a great name in sail. So she must consider that in measuring any excitement she could not quite understand.
    “I like the shoes,” she said.
    “But are you mad?”
    She hesitated and then asked, “Should I be?”
    He suddenly decided to back out of the whole thing.
    “Maybe I just picked a poor day for these things,” he said gloomily.
    “Yes, you might have,” she admitted.
    He let it rest and moved—a large angular man who was withdrawing from, but not abandoning, a situation that had temporarily bested him—walking past her desk. He said, “Arbogast won’t sail on Vameric today. Too weatherish. So we’re calling off the test run until later. You had heard, of course?”
    He was being elaborately matter-of-fact.
    Sarah nodded that she knew about Arbogast and no trial today. It occurred to her that she had handled a situation ineptly. He thinks I was curt , she decided, but I did not really feel so.
    Then Most left, closing the door after him. And she found herself glancing at the places where he had been in the room, her cruising-schooner design that he had inspected, a chair that he had occupied very briefly. She knew some dissatisfaction.
    It was four o’clock before Brill phoned.
    “All set,” the lawyer said.

Chapter Four
    T HERE WAS A TALL palm tree with a silver trunk growing at an angle of about twenty degrees off zenith. Around the base of the palm were four palmettos, short, bushy, sprawling themselves from nests constructed of colored sea shells and cement. The palmettos made a little thicket about the base of the palm, like a tall skinny witch that had dropped her petticoats.
    She waited there…. She was not waiting so much as listening. Perhaps not listening so much, either, as she was using the five of her senses like raw-skinned fingers, combing the darkness with them.
    The darkness was nine o’clock February darkness with sundown half an hour gone. There should have been a certain amount of gold still sticking to the night, but there was none because the sky wore clouds like half a black skullcap. Rain no longer came down, but the night reeked of wetness, and rain pools like flat mirrors lay wherever there was a depression. But it was still windy. A Florida wind, as strong and warm and playful as a lusty lover.
    A cheek laid to the wind, Sarah watched the lumpish dark mass that was the Lineyack winter home. There were a few windows bright from light inside. There had been voices and the hollow clicking of billiard balls on a table. A record player had come on loudly, then dropped its volume. The scullery section of the house was nearest her, and she could hear kitchen sounds, and she had heard the mechanical throat of an intercommunicator in the butler’s pantry demanding service from another part of the house.
    Once, several minutes ago, she had thrown rigid attention at a large picture window. This was when she had glimpsed Lineyack himself for a moment. The barrel shoulders, the thick-naped neck, and slick goatlike white hair were her father-in-law’s. It was then that she found surely that her capacity for contempt of the old man was far from exhausted…. For nearly two years