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56 sea splashed somewhere down in the darkness. Then, between the empty sunlit air of the verge to the right and the wall of firs to the left, the breadth of yellow grass led them upward to the skyline and the southern end of the island. Often Archer had to climb ahead and pull her up the arduous hillside. As they gained the top, the firs gave place to pines and cedars, whose trunks, bleached by salt winds, had been blown about till the roots writhed above ground and the distorted branches grew away from the sea. From among the trunks gleamed the eastern sky. This was the same tempestuous grove that Archer had seen from the boat; and perhaps it was some remembrance of the lurking ambiguity of movement among these trunks that made him ask:—

"Have n't the fellows in Black Harbor ever troubled your father or you? They seem a rough set"—

"No, indeed," replied Helen wonderingly. "They 're just poor fishermen, I think. They only came and lived there; my father said nothing. But he has forbidden me to go