She stood on the bowsprit and watched the harbor open before her. A complex of gray galvanized warehouses and work-buildings lay on a low peninsula just inside the pass. The supertanker was moving to take up moorings at the outer dock. A French warship lay at the Navy yard further into the bight of the harbor. An enormous Russian passenger liner, flying a red star, dominated the downtown wharf. Along her upper deck was strung a banner: “CHAMPAGNE AND CAVIAR CRUISE OF THE SOUTH PACIFIC.” Above it a great hammer-and-sickle gleamed on one of her four stacks.

Lindy dropped the sails and began to furl them. Louie tried to help her, the first constructive move he had made since Takarava. In an hour or so, if all went well, he should be in the hands of his mother’s aunt, who lived in Papeete.

Dead ahead of the pass stood a half-finished natatorium and a simple white church with a red spire. A modern post office sprawled on the waterfront by a park that looked, from the blazing heart of the harbor, very cool and dark. Anchored bow-out were so many yachts that it seemed impossible that they could squeeze in.

They crept under power along the boats pressed gunwale-to-gunwale. Their sterns, to the busy street, drooped flags of every country. At one end of the line towered a Chinese junk, apparently converted to a restaurant. Lindy tensed. Several boats down the line from it lay a low-slung steel ketch, painted orange.

On teak trail-boards on her bows was carved Xanadu. A carved mermaid rode her stem. And waving to Lindy from her forecastle was Jean-Paul, solid, broad-shouldered, tanned.

Again, her stomach flipped. Her cheeks felt hot. The feeling was ridiculous. The way to stop it was to flee. She almost asked Mitch to anchor out.

Instead, she tossed her hair from her eyes and smoothed it back. Jean-Paul swung his hand in an arc along his rail, indicating room to squeeze in, and began to tie bumpers along his gunwale. A slender young Tahitian emerged from the forward hatch. He wore a flower in his hair. He climbed to the ketch’s bowsprit to wait for a line.

Mitch dropped his bow anchor, swung his stern to the quay, and flung the youth a looping line from aft. The mahoo hauled it in, and in a few minutes Lindy was grinning like an idiot across five feet of water into the deep blue eyes, with no thought of fleeing at all.

The moment lasted timelessly. She became aware that Louie was staring at her, with the wise old face, and that there was work to do, and still, she could not draw her glance away.