mainland. Then he watched Helen, as she ran down the lower slope into the pastoral shadows.
V
He walked slowly over ledges and grass, the long shadows creeping to meet him. The sunlight stole upward, left his face, left the white birch tops, left the fir points, and was gone from the island. The breeze grew cool. And when he stood on the pink ledge above the downward pass to Black Harbor, lights already twinkled from the town, and the northern headlands were black against the afterglow. He stood looking for a while, his joy quiet and deep. Yesterday, and the two years before, he had been a cheerful runaway, letting money and goods lie fallow ashore, rejoicing in bare, hard life and in youth. He had come over to this island to fill an idle day or two,—and here was Helen,—and in the twinkling of an eye life had changed, had grown more complex, serious, yet strangely fortunate. He had given some fugitive thought to such matters. "But I did n't
