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.

She told him of letters she had written him from boarding school that she had not sent. She asked forgiveness for getting pregnant before she was married, and forgetting his birthday in 1968, and being in Paris instead of home when he had a prostate operation in ‘69, and of course for not beating back immediately when he had his “cardiac” last year.

When she had finished her agenda, he gave no sign that he understood, but there was nothing new in that. It was a great purgative. Completed, it left nothing to do, except to help with bedpans and washings, and reading him Kipling, whom she remembered as the only poet her father had ever touched.

It was like reading to a corpse, but she persisted out of guilt for a week. Then she kissed him goodbye.