“My!  Why, I always allowed that was only the cross stuck up in the Lone Mountain Cemetery,” she said.

“You are a Catholic?”

“I reckon.”

“And you are an Italian?”

“Father is, but mother was a ’Merikan, same as me.  Mother’s dead.”

“And your father is the fisherman yonder?”

“Yes,—­but,” with a look of pride, “he’s got the biggest boat of any.”

“And only you and your family are ashore here?”

“Yes, and sometimes Mark.”  She laughed an odd little laugh.

“Mark?  Who’s he?” he asked quickly.

He had not noticed the sudden coquettish pose and half-affected bashfulness of the girl; he was thinking only of the possibility of detection by strangers.

“Oh, he is Marco Franti, but I call him ‘Mark.’  It’s the same name, you know, and it makes him mad,” said the girl, with the same suggestion of archness and coquetry.

But all this was lost on Jarman.

“Oh, another Italian,” he said, relieved.  She turned away a little awkwardly when he added, “But you haven’t told me your name, you know.”

“Cara.”

“Cara,—­that’s ‘dear’ in Italian, isn’t it?” he said, with a reminiscence of the opera and a half smile.

“Yes,” she said a little scornfully, “but it means Carlotta,—­Charlotte, you know.  Some girls call me Charley,” she said hurriedly.

“I see—­Cara—­or Carlotta Franti.”

To his surprise she burst into a peal of laughter.

“I reckon not yet.  Franti is Mark’s name, not mine.  Mine is Murano,—­Carlotta Murano.  Good-by.”  She moved away, then stopped suddenly and said, “I’m comin’ again some time when the thing is working,” and with a nod of her head, ran away.  He looked after her; could see the outlines of her youthful figure in her slim cotton gown,—­limp and clinging in the damp sea air, and the sudden revelation of her bare ankles thrust stockingless into canvas shoes.

He went back into his cabin, when presently his attention was engrossed by an incoming vessel.  He made the signals, half expecting, almost hoping, that the girl would return to watch him.  But her figure was already lost in the sand dunes.  Yet he fancied he still heard the echoes of her voice and his own in this cabin which had so long been dumb and voiceless, and he now started at every sound.  For the first time he became aware of the dreadful disorder and untidiness of its uninvaded privacy.  He could scarcely believe he had been living with his stove, his bed, and cooking utensils all in one corner of the barnlike room, and he began to put them “to rights” in a rough, hard formality, strongly suggestive of his convict experience.  He rolled up his blankets into a hard cylinder at the head of his cot.  He scraped out his kettles and saucepans, and even “washed down” the floor, afterwards sprinkling clean dry sand, hot with the noonday sunshine,