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 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.

“But I saw him about four o’clock,” Fairchild argued. “He was in the boat with us. Didn’t you see him, Major? but that’s so: you were not with us. You saw him, Mark, didn’t you?”

“He was in the boat when we started. I remember that. But I don’t remember seeing him after Ernest fell out.”

“Well, I do. I know I saw him on deck right after we got back. But I can’t remember seeing him in the boat