He inclined his head toward the yachts. She looked down the line of them. There were flashlights probing everywhere. She could hear voices from the new American sloop; someone was calling Louie. The swell was too high. They were all getting ready to leave the danger of the seawall. She imagined that some would run for it and some would anchor across the harbor in the lee of the Motu Uta docks. She heard a diesel engine start below, and then another.

La Grande Passe thundered at long, slow intervals. She could see plumes of greenish phosphorescence spilling over the reef past Quai au Long Cours.

“Lindy, this, tonight, with us, I knew it must happen, and you must not have bad feelings, for then it would ruin it all.”

“You knew? I didn’t.”

He looked out at the harbor and smiled. “Nothing is a secret in these islands. The girl, Tiare, in l’Hôpital at Nuku Hiva, she has told me that délirant—when you had the delirium—you spoke of me. And it is strange, but I had already taken steps, of which you could know nothing—”

She told him that she knew about his message to the doctor, and of how far he had walked to try to get it through.

He looked embarrassed. “And of course, you do not believe in the coconut radio, so—”

"I believe,” she said. “Where you and I are concerned, I believe.”

He kissed her goodbye. She watched him cross the street. In ten minutes Taarii had winched him out to his bow-anchor. They hoisted sail easily and quickly. By the time the boats with engines had finally vacated the seawall, she could see him ghosting toward the pass. She lost his silhouette against a ship by Quai au Long Cours, but she caught it against the entrance beacon once, and then he was gone.

She crawled back under the mosquito netting and drifted into sleep.

Mitch awakened jumpy and tired at 5 A.M. He had slept hardly at all. All night Linda Lee had tugged and creaked at the rotting pilings of the dock, whining for sea-room before she was caught.

The barometer, to his surprise, was high. He began to log its readings. But by six the pressure was pumping oddly, rising and falling a few hundredths of an inch almost before his eyes. He could see, above the peaks, hints of the Golden Dragon’s mare’s tails, brushstrokes converging like a great golden arrow toward the northeast. By seven the pressure was falling steadily. At nine, it was four-hundredths of an inch under his eight o’clock reading. WWV located Arlene a hundred miles north of Tahiti, which it would apparently miss. Her winds were seventy knots, force twelve. She was two hundred miles northeast of him, and moving at fourteen knots. She had recurved. Unless she recurved again, she would hit Bora Bora in less than twenty-four hours.