Tourists bored them both, but it was their own fault. They were becoming boat-bound and xenophobic. They could hardly carry on a conversation except with other sailors. Mitch’s interests had shifted from tort and equity to varnish, diesels, and hull stability. Lindy, despite herself, was too involved in the care and feeding of eggs at sea to read about Watergate.

They touched at Raiatea. They rowed the dinghy up the river Faaroa, where the ancestors of the New Zealand Maoris had lived. She plucked hibiscus from the banks, feeling like a model in a National Geographic feature, as Mitch paddled lazily. They touched at Tahaa, and then, having saved the most beautiful French island for last, headed toward the craggy peak they could see only a few miles to the west, the jagged summit of Bora Bora, Michener’s Bali Hai.

Mitch, trolling under power across the mirror-calm channel in the lee of Raiatea, caught a wahoo-roroa, the Tahitians called it. He cleaned it and hung it by its tail from the clew of the mizzen-boom, and it swung there as they shot the wide Bora Bora pass, steering on the range-marks.

They found only two familiar boats. The Dutch ketch, apparently racing for Samoa to beat the hurricane season, was weighing anchor off the crazy, palm-thatched Hotel Oa Oa. The Star of Peace, expelled from Tahiti just after Linda Lee had sailed, was tied to a seaplane buoy, looking for a leak in its bilges before it faced the run to Auckland.

Lindy, at the wheel under the swinging roroa, realized suddenly that she was looking for the orange steel ketch. It was not there. They tied to the ramshackle Oa Oa dock. A swarthy young gendarme awaited them there, with a week-old radiogram in his hand.

Her father had had a stroke. He was paralyzed and speechless. Bobby begged her to fly home. Mitch pressed her in his arms. She was numb with shock, full of guilt because she could not even cry.

“Do you want me to go, too?” he murmured.

She stared at him. If he had to ask, the hell with it. And he was right to hesitate: they shouldn’t leave Linda Lee unattended in an open lagoon this time of year anyway. Shawn wouldn’t care, might not even know. She herself had things to say; maybe it was too late already. But to make Mitch fly back would be stupid.

They had her visa stamped by the gendarme and she was on a twin-engined Air Polynésie plane to Tahiti in two hours. It had taken them six months to sail from San Francisco to Bora Bora, and she was home, by Pan Am, the next morning.

Her father did not know her at all, or, if he did, could not convey it. In the hospital bed even the devil-horns of his tousled hair seemed wilted. The first evening, after Bobby and his wife had left, she took his hand, drew a deep breath, and began to talk.