“Sure, I know where your boat is, seen her hove to when I come along. In mighty shaller water, too. Ain’t more’n three miles down the lake,” the man told them, setting a galvanized pail of water on the edge of the veranda. His house stood on piles driven into the moist earth at the edge of the jungle. Before it a dark broad stream was seemingly without any movement at all between rigid palisades of trees.

The man stood on the veranda and watched her while she poured dippersful of heavenly water on her head. The water ran through her hair and dripped down her face, sopping her dress, while the man stood and watched her. His blue collarless shirt was fastened at the throat by a brass collar button, his sweat-stained suspenders drew his faded cotton trousers snugly over his paunch. His loose jowls moved rhythmically and he spat brownly upon the earth at their feet, barely averting his head.

“You folks been wandering around in the swamp all day?” he asked staring at her with his pale, heavy eyes, roving his gaze slowly up her muddy stockings and her stained dress. “What you want to go back fer, now? Feller got enough, huh?” He spat again, and made a heavy sound of disparagement and disgust. “Ain’t no such thing as enough. Git a real man, next time.” He looked at David and asked him a question, using an unprintable verb.

Anger, automatic and despite his weariness, fired him slowly, but she forestalled him. “Let’s get back to the boat, first,” she said to him. She looked at the man again, meeting his pale heavy stare. “How much?” she asked briskly.

“Five dollars.” He glanced at David again. “In advance.”

David put his hand to his waist. “With my money,” she said quickly, watching him as he dug into his watch pocket and extracted a single bill, neatly folded. “No, no: with mine,” she insisted peremptorily, staying his hand. “Where’s mine?” she asked, and he drew from his trousers her crumpled mass of notes, and she took it.

The man accepted the bill and spat again. He descended heavily from the porch and led the way down to the water where his launch was moored. They got in and he cast off and thrust the boat away from the shore and bent heavily over the engine. “Yes, sir, that’s the way with these town fellers. No guts. Next time, come over to this side and git you a real man. I kin git off most any day. And I won’t be honing to git home by sundown, neither,” he added, looking back over his shoulder.

“Shut your mouth,” she told him sharply. “Make him shut up, David.” The man paused, staring at her with his pale sleepy eyes.

“Now, look-a-here,” he began heavily.

“Shut up and start your flivver,” she repeated. “You’ve got your money, so let’s go if we are going.”

“Well, that’s all right, too. I like ’em to have a little git-up-and-git to ’em.” He stared at her with his lazy drooping eyes, chewing rhythmically, then he called her a name.

David rose from his seat, but she restrained him with one hand and she cursed the man fluently and glibly. “Now get started,” she finished. “If he opens his head again, David, just knock him right out of the boat.”

The man snarled his yellow teeth at them, then he bent again over the engine. Its fretful clamor rose soon and the boat slid away circling, cutting the black motionless water. Ahead, soon, there was a glint of space beyond the trees, a glint of water; and soon they had passed from the bronze nave of the river onto the lake beneath the rushing soundless wings of sunset and a dying glory of day under the cooling brass bowl of the sky.

.          .          .          .          .          .          .

The Nausikaa was more like a rosy gull than ever in the sunset, squatting sedately upon the darkening indigo of the water, against the black metallic trees. The man shut off his fussy engine and the launch slid up alongside and the man caught the rail and held his boat stationary, watching her muddy legs as she climbed aboard the yacht.

No one was in sight. They stood at the rail and looked downward upon his thick backside while he spun the flywheel again. The engine caught at last and the launch circled away from the yacht and headed again into the sunset while the fussy engine desecrated the calm of water and sky and trees. Soon the boat was only a speck in the fading path of the sunset.

“David?” she said, when it had gone. She turned and put her firm tanned hand on his breast, and he turned his head also and looked at her with his beastlike longing.

“It’s all right,” he said after a time. She put her arms around him again, sexless and hard, drawing his cheek down to her sober moist kiss. This time he didn’t move his head.

“I’m sorry, David.”

“It’s all right,” he repeated. She laid her hands flat on his chest and he released her. For a time they gazed at each other. Then she left him and crossed the deck and descended the companionway without looking back, and so left him and the evening from which the sun had gone suddenly and into which night was as suddenly come, and across which the fretful thin sound of the launch came yet faintly along the dreaming water, beneath the tarnished sky where stars were already pricking like a hushed magical blooming of flowers.

.          .          .          .          .          .          .

She found the others at dinner in the saloon, since what breeze there was was still offshore and the saloon was screened. They greeted her with various surprise, but she ignored them and her aunt’s round suffused face, going haughtily to her place.

“Patricia,” Mrs. Maurier said at last, “where have you been?”

“Walking,” the niece snapped. In her hand she carried a small crumpled mass and she put this on the table, separating the notes and smoothing them into three flat sheaves.

“Patricia,” said Mrs. Maurier again.

“I owe you six dollars,” she told Miss Jameson, putting one of the sheaves beside her plate. “You only had a dollar,” she informed Mrs. Wiseman, passing a single note across the table to her. “I’ll pay you the rest of yours when we get home,” she told her aunt, reaching across Mr. Talliaferro’s shoulder with the third sheaf. She met her aunt’s apoplectic face again. “I brought your steward back, too. So you haven’t got anything to kick about.”

“Patricia,” Mrs. Maurier said. She said, chokingly: “Mr. Gordon, didn’t he come back with you?”

“He wasn’t with me. What would I want to take him along for? I already had one man.”

Mrs. Maurier’s face became dreadful, and as the blood died swooning in her heart she had again that brief vision of floating inert buttocks, later to wash ashore with that inopportune and terrible implacability of the drowned. “Patricia,” she said dreadfully.

“Oh, haul in your sheet,” the niece interrupted wearily. “You’re jibbing. Gosh, I’m hungry.” She sat down and met her brother’s cold gaze. “And you too, Josh,” she added, taking a piece of bread.

The nephew glanced briefly at his aunt’s wrung face. “You ought to beat hell out of her,” he said calmly, going on with his dinner.