As they bowled over the causeway to the Island Riever said: "I haven't given up hope of you, though. You have a natural hatred of sham. I'll teach you to face the truth yet!"
At the steamboat wharf at the other end of the Island the speed boat was waiting, her starboard light a startling gleam of emerald in a dusky gray world, her white-clad crew sitting quietly in the moonlight. Pen and her packages were handed aboard and they flew for Broome's Point.
Out on the water the moon indifferently resumed her sway. The whole earth was hers to tread on. The front of the island with its odd row of semi-detached, whitewashed shacks looked like something as foreign as Algiers. In the bow wave that rolled away from the speed boat there was a dull phosphorescent glow like saturated moonlight, and looking over through the shadow of the boat one could see fishes dart away like little balls of pale moonlight. Pen's face was as beautiful and passionless as the moon's.
In the sheltered nook astern the face of Riever the would-be strong man, the Devil's advocate, broke up like any calfish boy's. He fumbled clumsily for her hand.
"Don't!" whispered Pen sharply. "They'll see!"
His eyebrows went up in a stare of indignant amazement. Nobody had ever spoken to him like that. But as it had absolutely no effect, they gradually came down again into the likeness of a sulky schoolboy's.
She struggled hard with her repulsion. "Well ... well ... I hate to be touched!"
"One would think there was something the matter with me!" he muttered.
"This is simply weak of you," Pen said cunningly.
Fortunately, as it was but three minutes to the Point, the scene could not be prolonged.
As they drew close to the old wharf they made out that there were a number of men upon it with lanterns and flash lights.
"What's going on there?" Riever asked his steersman.
"Couldn't say, sir. Everything was quiet when we started over."
They heard a hail from the wharf: "On board the _Alexandra_!"
The yacht's big search-light was thrown dazzlingly on the end of the wharf showing up all the figures in sharp silhouette.
The speed-boat approached unnoticed from the other side. The instant she drew alongside Riever sprang out and ran across. Pen guessed what was happening, and her heart seemed to stop and sink like a stone. But she followed Riever with a composed face.