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The Nettie B., when compelled to surrender her prisoner, had

rounded Nova Scotia and was on the home-stretch toward Quoddy

Roads. She was, in fact, less than thirty miles away from Grande

Mignon Island, and Code had thought with a great and bitter

homesickness of the joy just a sight of her would be.

He longed for the white Swallowtail lighthouse with its tin

swallow above; for the tumbled green-clothed granite of the

harbor approaches; for the black, sharp-toothed reefs that showed

on the half-water near the can-buoy, and for the procession of

stately headlands to north and south, fading from sight in a

mantle of purple and gray.

But most of all for the crescent of stony beach, the nestle of

white cottages along the King's Road, and the green background of

the mountain beyond, with Mallaby House in the very heart of it.