the sailors were in the boat, rowing towards the
Narcissus. Their song came back across the water:

"... O you A.B. sailor-man,
Wet your whistle while you can,
For the piping of the bugle calls you 'ome!
'Ome--'ome--'ome,
Calls you on to your fo'c'stle 'ome!"

The evening came down, and Guida sat in the kitchen doorway looking
out over the sea, and wondering why Philip had sent her no message. Of
course he would not come himself, he must not: he had promised her. But
how much she would have liked to see him for just one minute, to feel
his arms about her, to hear him say good-bye once more. Yet she loved
him the better for not coming.

By and by she became very restless. She would have been almost happier
if he had gone that day: he was within call of her, still they were not
to see each other.

She walked up and down the garden, Biribi the dog by her side. Sitting
down on the bench beneath the appletree, she recalled every word that
Philip had said to her two days before. Every tone of his voice, every
look he had given her, she went over in her thoughts. There is no
reporting in the world so exact, so perfect, as that in a woman's mind,
of the words, looks, and acts of her lover in the first days of mutual
confession and understanding.

It can come but once, this dream, fantasy, illusion--call it what you
will: it belongs to the birth hour of a new and powerful feeling; it is
the first sunrise of the heart. What comes after may be the calmer joy
of a more truthful, a less ideal emotion, but the transitory glory of
the love and passion of youth shoots higher than all other glories
into the sky of time. The splendour of youth is its madness, and the
splendour of that madness is its unconquerable belief. And great is the
strength of it, because violence alone can destroy it. It does not yield
to time nor to decay, to the long wash of experience that wears away the
stone, nor to disintegration. It is always broken into pieces at a blow.
In the morning all is well, and ere the evening come the radiant temple
is in ruins.

At night when Guida went to bed she could not sleep at first. Then came
a drowsing, a floating between waking and sleeping, in which a hundred
swift images of her short past flashed through her mind:

A butterfly darting in the white haze of a dusty road, and the cap of
the careless lad that struck it down.... Berry-picking along the hedges
beyond the qua