left it gray and cheerless as the night side of Brecqhou.

Wherever he was and whatever he did, it was always Margaret,
Margaret,--and Margaret lost to him.

By the end of the third week, however, the tonic effects of the strong
sea air and water began to work inwards. Healthy body would no longer
suffer sick heart. He had taken his morning plunge hitherto as a
matter of course, now he began to enjoy it and to look forward to
it--certain index of all-round recovery.

His appetite grew till he felt it needed an apology, at which Mrs.
Carre laughed enjoyably. He began to take more interest in his
surroundings for their own sakes. His thoughts of Margaret, with their
after-glow of tender memory, were like the soft sad haze which falls
on Guernsey when the sun has sunk and left behind it, in the upper
sky, its slowly dying fires of dull red amber and gold.

Towards the end of the fourth week he tentatively fished out his
manuscript and began to read it--with pauses. He grew interested in
it. He saw new possibilities in the story.--His life was getting back
on to the rails again.

XI

Greater bodily peace and comfort than he found in that thick-set,
creeper-covered, little cottage in the Rue Lucas, man might scarcely
hope for. Anything more would have tended to luxury and made for
restraint.

He was free as the wind to come and go as he listed, to roam the
lonely lanes all night and watch the coming of the dawn--which he did;
or to lie abed all day--which he did not; to do any mortal thing that
pleased him, so long only as he gave his hostess full and fair warning
of the state of his appetite and the times when it must be satisfied.

His quarters were not perhaps palatial, but what man, king of himself
alone, would live in a palace?

He bumped his head with the utmost regularity against the lintel of
the front door each time he entered, and only learned at last to bob
by instinct. And the beams in the ceilings were so low that they
claimed recognition somewhat after the manner of a boisterous
acquaintance.

But doors and windows were always open, night and day, and his good
friends the dogs came in to greet him by way of the windows quite as
often as by the doors.

All through the black times those two were his close companions, and
no better could he have had. They asked nothing of him--or almost
nothing, and they gave him all they had. They were grateful from the
bottom of their large hearts for any slig