If you're in a hurry, you can land there, and we can go to the house by way of the hidden path.

It will cut off a mile or so.

You have a flashlight.

So--" He let his voice trail away, frozen to silence by the rigidly hostile little figure outlined at the other end of the boat by the tumble of phosphorus in their wake.
Claire roused herself, from a gloomy reverie, enough to shift the course of the craft and to head it for the dim-seen sandspit that was backed by the ebony darkness of the mangrove swamp.
Neither of them spoke again, until, with a swishing sound and a soft grate of the light-draught boat, the keel clove its way into the offshore sand and the craft came to coughing halt twenty feet from land.
Claire roused herself, from a gloomy reverie in which she had fallen.

Subconsciously, she had accepted the man's suggestion that they take the short cut.