They were married in the little Kitty Hawk church at noon the next day.

Before the hour of the wedding came, certain matters had been attended to. Letters had been written in time to catch the launch which would return with the minister from Kitty Hawk to the mainland. The clothing stock of the “Bazaar” had been materially reduced by the demands both Betty and Fessenden had made upon it. The Wisp had been loaded with everything in the way of food, water, and utensils, that could be needed for a fortnight’s cruise.

“Why bother with the sloop?” Danton had demanded. “There’s plenty of room on the West Wind. We can all go honeymooning together, eh, Madge? Over to Bermuda, if you like.”

To Fessenden’s infinite relief, Betty had declined this well-meant offer. “No, thank you,” she had said, blushing a little. “After to-night, I’ll go back to the dear little Wisp—where I’ll belong, you know. Bob White is going to take me down through the sounds, and then back through the Dismal Swamp, home.”

Madge and Danton, supplemented by the entire crew of the West Wind, were the witnesses at the wedding.

It seemed to Fessenden that Betty’s eyes were bluer than the sea that broke on the inlet bar, and the light in them more mysterious and wonderful. She looked a fair and innocent child.

He answered the minister’s questions, and even signed the marriage certificate, in a sort of daze, a daze from which he roused himself only after they had eaten the wedding breakfast on the West Wind, and having boarded the Wisp, were waving farewell to the others across the water.

Betty serenely assumed command. “I’ll take the wheel, Boatswain Bob,” she said, “and you get up sail.”

He cast off from the float, and set jib, flying jib, and mainsail in a trice. As the sloop gathered headway, the helmswoman stood under the stern of the larger yacht.

“Good-by, good-by, children,” called Danton patronizingly.

“Bon voyage, children,” chorused Madge. “Be sure to love each other.”

“Good-by, old married people,” retorted Fessenden.

The Wisp stood wing-and-wing down the sound. Fessenden lounged at his ease beside the charming captain.

“Betty,” he said, “has it yet occurred to you that you are really my wife?”

She gave him a swift, half-frightened glance. “No-o. I haven’t really had much time to think about it, you know.”

“Just now it came over me in a sort of wave. If you don’t object, I’ll call you ‘dear’ occasionally, simply to assure myself it’s true.”

“Whenever you like,” she returned politely.

“Dear!”

“Oh! That’s rather—pronounced, isn’t it?”

“Very well pronounced. Very pleasant to pronounce, in fact.”

She sat down trustfully beside him, a guiding hand on the wheel. “Do you know, Bob White, I’ve often thought it would be delightful to sail like this with a ra-ther good-looking—comrade?”

“Am I the man, may I ask?”

“You are.”

“Thank you—dear. And do you know that for the last two or three days I’ve been thinking I’d give my hope of salvation to sail like this with Betty Landis?”

She gave him another quick glance. “With whom?”

“I mean with Betty Fessenden, of course.”

“O-oh!”

“I’m dreaming now of sailing on and on with her. The other night I dreamed that she put ‘dear’ after my name, and that if we could only sail and sail long enough she might do it again.”

His half-closed lids hid the warmth in his eyes, but his voice shook with the passion he struggled to control. She shrank a little.

“You needn’t,” he said. “Please don’t. You can trust me absolutely. I—I was merely dreaming, you know.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you, Bob White—dear. Trust you? My presence here shows that I do—you know that.” Her fingers touched his hair so fleetingly that he hardly dared believe she had meant it for a caress.

Presently she relinquished the wheel to him and took his place among the cushions.

He noticed how round her throat was, and how deliciously white. The rose-tipped chin and red mouth held him fascinated, until the glint of bayonets in the eyes warned him to control his glances.

“You’re the most adorable skipper I ever saw,” he declared.

“I’ve a confession to make, Boatswain.”

“Confess then, Nancy Lee.”

“My ankle wasn’t hurt that day in the brook. I didn’t really stumble.”

“What!”

She nodded contritely. “No. I did it on purpose. Wasn’t it perfectly shameless?”

“I’ve had a far-away feeling that you made a miraculous recovery from that strain. But why did you pretend?”

“Just as a game. I wanted to see what the—the good-looking stranger would do.”

“You found out.”

“Goodness, yes, didn’t I!” They laughed together at the thought.

“Madge and Charlie Danton,” she went on—“do you think they’re really in love? I mean, do you think their love will last?”

“Don’t you?”

“Ye-es, I do. She has just enough esprit de diable to hold him. It is ‘infinite variety’ that pleases him, I fancy, and Madge is twenty women in one.”

“You’re a philosopher. By the way, where did you learn French? Do they teach that in the ‘little red-roofed schoolhouse’ in Maryland?”

“Haven’t I told you about my teacher? And I went to a very good school in Baltimore, if you please.”

“That reminds me that I know hardly anything about my own wife—only that her name was Betty Landis. You once told me that your mother was well-connected, Betty. Who was she?”

The mainsail sheet, which she had been carelessly handling, at that moment slipped through her fingers, and the boom went flying out. He was barely able to keep the sloop from jibing.

“Be careful, child,” he warned. “Take a turn or two around that cleat there.”

“Bob White,” she said, when affairs were again in order, “I’ve been thinking—of what you must be giving up in marrying me. I don’t mean only your bachelor freedom, although I know that’s precious to a man. But you are giving up—everything.”

“I’m lucky to get the chance.”

“Perhaps I’ve spoiled your career.”

“Nonsense!”

“It may not be nonsense. You are a man of a different world from the country one you found me in. It was only an hour ago we were married, but I can see already that I was perfectly mad and unutterably selfish to let you sacrifice yourself for me. A braver girl—a better girl—wouldn’t have cared what silly society might say. I was wicked to marry you!”

“Tut! tut!”

“I’m perfectly serious—miserably serious.”

“Then I’ll be serious, too. I admit that you and I ought to be different, but we aren’t. I don’t know why it should be so, dear, but we both ‘belong.’ We’re the same sort. You must feel it as well as I.”

All that golden afternoon they sailed, and all the afternoon they talked. Her mind played with a hundred fancies, grave and gay, and Fessenden heard her with delight, and with ever-renewed wonder. She seemed to him a sort of Admirable Crichton, possessing heaven-sent intuition of all that was rare and charming and useful.

At dusk they lowered all sail, let go the anchor, and made the sloop secure for the night.

Then, with his respectful help, Betty cooked the dinner, and served it on a camp-table in the cockpit.

That dinner was Olympian. A sirloin steak, deliciously broiled—“I intend to give you a man’s dinner,” she had declared; French fried potatoes, as hot as the flames they came hissing from; coffee, as clear as amber; and fresh tea-biscuits which one was allowed to dip in Kitty Hawk honey.

When the dinner things had been cleared away, they sat under the stars and watched the lights twinkle here and there from lonely cabins along-shore. Now and then Betty’s fingers strayed over the guitar she had borrowed from the West Wind. The light breeze sighed an answer through the cypress and tamarack trees of the swampy cape near-by.

Betty pointed dreamily shoreward. “The ‘swampers’ down here are a wild lot. During the war my uncle was attacked by them—on the way down to his district.”

“His district?”

“He commanded the Eastern Military District of North Carolina, you know, and—and—” She broke off abruptly. “Oh, dear! My foot’s asleep—terribly! Will you put a cushion under it for me?”

“One minute,” he said. “I don’t quite make this out. If your uncle commanded a military district here during the war, he must have been a Federal general, a man of distinction, yet you—”

“My foot’s asleep, and prickles dreadfully.”

“Just a moment.” She could feel the growing fixedness of his glance. “I—remember—this sort of thing has happened before. On the island—Rincoteague—when I asked you what you knew about Madge Yarnell, you suddenly discovered that it was raining. This morning, too, something was said about your mother, and somehow the sail got adrift at that very moment. You had hold of it. And just now your foot falls asleep in the nick of time. Betty, I don’t like this sort of thing! I’ve had enough confidence in you to marry you—to marry you very much in the dark. Isn’t it fair you should have confidence in me, a little?”

She was listening with half-averted face and a smile that baffled him.

As he watched her, a score of confusing recollections rushed through his mind like fiery phantoms: Madge Yarnell’s recognition of the envelope received from White Cottage; her determined effort to accompany him thither the next day; her theatric assault upon them, whip in hand, on the road from Jim George’s—even yet he found it hard to believe that they had narrowly escaped a tragedy!

Harry Cleborne, Fessenden had then imagined, had warned him against his pursuit of an innocent country girl, and had puzzled him by obscure reference to another man, and on top of this had denied all knowledge of Betty Landis.

He recalled a hundred reticences and reservations on the part of Betty, natural enough at the time, but now possessed of a disturbing significance. Her knowledge of the world; her voice and bearing; the words she had let slip of her mother, of her Baltimore friends and school, of her uncle, the Union general! What did these things mean?

Light began to break upon him. Madge had not pressed upon them that day because she had discovered only him where she had expected to find Danton. Cleborne had really babbled of Danton and the Other Lady. Danton himself, in their talk on the beach at Kitty Hawk, had said that the Other had been in seclusion—hiding from his pursuit of her—in a farmhouse on the Eastern Shore.

He towered over Betty in sudden fury. “What! What is all this? Who are you? Who are you, I say?”

The smile died from the girl’s lips, and she shrank before his white face and fierce eyes.

Shame and rage so choked him that his words were almost incoherent, but they were the more terrible for that. She cowered away from him to the very limits of the gunwale.

“Oh, please!” she said. “Don’t! Don’t! Oh, please!”

The tenderness he had lately felt for her came over him in a wave as he looked down at the shrinking figure.

“I—I beg your pardon,” he said. “I lost my head. Don’t be afraid—it’s all over now. I beg your pardon.”

Without another word or look he turned and sought his room in the forecastle.

Half an hour later, as he lay staring into the darkness, he heard a muffled beat, as of a drum. Betty was playing her guitar in her room.

Gradually the drum-beat increased and quickened until it grew into a continuous roll, a throbbing cadence that thrilled through and through him. The roar of the wind and the mutter of the sea were in the shattering roll of the drum.

At the very height of its clamor—while he strove in vain to catch its meaning—it passed abruptly into silence. He was left staring into the dark.