intimate revelation simply, as if the time for a conventional reticence
had passed.

"They were lookers all right," Ralph Addington went on. "I'd pick the
golden blonde, the second from the right." He, too, spoke in a
matter-of-fact tone, as though he were selecting a favorite from the
front row in the chorus.

"It must have happened if we saw it," Frank Merrill said. There was in
his voice a note of petulance, almost childish. "But we ought not to
have seen it. It has no right to be. It upsets things so."

"What are we all standing up like gawks for?" Pete Murphy demanded with
a sudden irritability.

"Sit down!"

Everybody dropped. They all sat as they fell. They sat motionless. They
sat silent.

"The name of this place is 'Angel Island,'" announced Billy Fairfax
after a long time. His tone was that of a man whose thoughts, swirling
in phantasmagoria, seek anchorage in fact.

They did not sleep that night.

When Frank Merrill arose the next morning, Ralph Addington was just
returning from a stroll down the beach. Ralph looked at the same time
exhausted and recuperated. He was white, tense, wild-eyed, but recently
aroused interior fires glowed through his skin, made up for his lost