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 golden bell hung in my heart). “The man who brought me back was the same one who brought them back yesterday.”

“He was?” said Fairchild. “He’s doing a landoffice business with deserters, ain’t he?”

“Yes,” Gordon answered. And he went on down the passage with a singing lightness in his heart, a bright silver joy like wings.

The deck was deserted, as on that other afternoon. But he waited patiently in the hushed happiness of his dream and his arrogant bitter heart was young as any yet, as forgetful of yesterday and to-morrow; and soon, as though in answer to it, she came barelegged and molded by the wind of motion, and her grave surprise ebbed and she thrust him a hard tanned hand.

“So you ran away,” she said.

“And so did you,” he answered after an interval filled with a thing all silver and clean and fine.

“That’s right. We’re sure the herrings on this boat, aren’t we?”

“Herrings?”

“Guts, you know,” she explained. She looked at him gravely from beneath the coarse dark bang of her hair. “But you came back,” she accused.

“And so did you,” he reminded her from amid his soundless silver wings.

“But were moving again, at last,” Mrs. Maurier repeated at intervals, with a detached air, listening to a sound somehow vaguely convivial that welled at intervals up the companionway. Presently Mrs. Wiseman remarked the hostess’ preoccupied air and she too ceased, hearkening.