He never stopped until he came to the weather darkened shanty where she lived.
A lighted lamp was in one of the windows on the ground floor. The soft glow of it streamed in a long ladder of light out to him in the darkness.
He opened the gate and went haltingly across the yard, and after a moment's hesitation he knocked at the door.
At the far end of the street the sea thudded over the yellow sanded beach; the pale stretch of it coming out of the grayness in a long white line.
The light from the lamp swept through the open doorway.
Something in his face terrified her; something that she had never before seen in those blue green eyes, the color of the sea.
"Oh, Mister, tell me; please--what is it?"
Her two hands went up to her throat and caught tightly at her neck.
She looked out into the quiet, darkening evening.
She stared up at him; her childlike eyes were very wide.
He never took his blue green eyes from off her face.
"Oh, little girl;" he muttered. "Little girl--"
"There's Sam Wilkins' smack--down there at the wharf. We could take that."
They went from the door together down the street and out onto the back patch of the wharf. Through the grayness they could see the boat rocking on the water at the farther end. The wail of the rising wind; the pounding of the sea; and close to them the muffled, bumping sound of the smack thrown again and again at the long wooden piles of the wharf.
Her arms went suddenly up around his neck. Her lips brushed across his. He felt her body shivering. He caught and held her to him; and then he let her go and went quickly to the end of the wharf and pulled the boat alongside and stepped into it.
He looked up at her standing there against the gray sky. He could see the white patches of her face and her hands and the pale mass of her hair that the wind had loosened. And down through the draggling grayness he distinctly saw her childlike eyes searching for his.
Before he could stop her she was in the boat.
"If you don't take me with you;" he had never heard her voice like that--"I'll come out myself. You can't leave me--you can't!"
The rain began then. Great drops of it fell into his face. The whining of the wind was terrific.
He rowed with all his strength. The whole thing was so strange to him. Her going. Their being out on the water. The rowing.