Mrs. Guy Vanton’s closest friend, at the time of her husband’s disappearance, was Tom Lupton, the Tommy Lupton of her girlhood, who had succeeded her father as keeper of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station. She went to Tommy—she had, very humanly and naturally, to go to someone—to tell him the news and talk over with him what should be done. She felt that she could the more honourably do this as Tom and her husband had been firm friends from the time, now many years ago, when seventeen-year-old Guy Vanton had thrown fifteen-year-old Tommy Lupton three times in a wrestling match of an unexpected character. Mary Smiley Vanton knew all about that match and knew the occasion of it, which had been herself. She was not self-conscious enough to suppose, however, that the outcome of that encounter in a clearing in the woods joined to certain sequential events had kept Tom Lupton a bachelor all these years. If she had thought about it at all she would probably have argued, quite justly, that the life of a Coast Guardsman on the Great South Beach is not favourable to marriage.

“This has not hit me so badly as I should have thought it would,” she confessed to her old friend as they sat together in the living room of the house John Hawkins had built, almost a century earlier, for himself and his wife. “Nor so badly, I am afraid, as it[230] ought to hit me. Which is a wicked sign, or a sign of wickedness, I suppose. Not a good sign, anyway.”

“Why?” Tom Lupton wanted to know.

“Because,” she answered, “when things are not as bad as we expect them to be we generally think them a good deal better than they are.”

Tom Lupton turned over the implications of this remark in his mind for several minutes. At length he asked: “I imagine you have decided what you want to do?”

Mrs. Vanton let her hands fall loosely in her lap. They had been hovering for a moment over dark red hair, as heavy in its coils, as full of sombre brilliance, as it had been on the day of her marriage to Guy Vanton. The milky whiteness of her skin was not suggestive of a woman nearly forty. Her face was unwrinkled and her blue eyes were keen; reflecting, not reflective. Only in the look of her mouth was there some slight alteration indicative of the passage, not so much of time, as of experience.

“There are only two things to do, of course,” she answered. “One is to search actively for him, and the other is to accept the situation. Were I free to do so I think I should go out and try to find him. That might be against his wish but I should feel I had to do it. But I am not free. There are the children, four of them. They are my children as well as his, and I must do my best for them. I’m sure that he wanted to do[231] his best for them, and he must have believed that in acting as he has done he was doing it.”

She paused and looked at Tom Lupton expectantly, as if waiting to be prompted further. And indeed, this may subconsciously have been her need of him. It was not so much that she needed his advice and counsel, in all likelihood, as that she needed someone who by a listening presence and by an occasional question or comment would help her to think the thing out and reach and record a clear conclusion. Her friend may have been aware of this. At any rate, he said: “Poor old Guy! I don’t think he’s to blame, do you?”

For an instant she was horrified by a conjecture.

“You don’t mean that you think he was not himself? That he was—out of his mind or anything like that?”

The man hastily disclaimed any such idea.

“I only meant,” he said, “that the person who is to blame is that old beast who brought him up.”

At this reference to Captain Buel Vanton she shuddered slightly, then said: “Yes, of course. But that would be a hopeful augury. Jacob King disappeared and Captain Vanton turned up in Blue Port. It was as if Dr. Jekyll had triumphed over Mr. Hyde.”

“I’d hardly call Captain Vanton a Dr. Jekyll,” Tom Lupton dissented.

Mary Vanton went on: “I think my husband wanted to remove from our children’s lives any trace of the[232] darkness in which he himself grew up. He had, as you know, his moods of profound dejection, never lasting, but liable to make us all unhappy with the sense of something that could not be shaken off. It wasn’t his fault. Had the children been older it would not have mattered so much. But, as you know, they all worshipped him.”

With the idea of helping her past this obstacle the man said: “You have made up your mind what you will tell them—the children?”

She made a sound of assent.

“To John, the oldest, I shall tell part of the whole story. I shall tell him of his father’s boyhood and of Captain Vanton’s life here in Blue Port; I shall simply tell him that Captain Vanton was an insa............