restedly loved he met in Piccadilly his friend Somers,
wonderfully spruced up, and hastening along with a preoccupied face.

'My dear fellow,' said Somers, 'what do you think! I was charged not to
tell you, but, hang it! I may just as well make a clean breast of it now
as later.'

'What--you are not going to...' began Pierston, with divination.

'Yes. What I said on impulse six months back I am about to carry out
in cold blood. Nichola and I began in jest and ended in earnest. We are
going to take one another next month for good and all.'

PART THIRD -- A YOUNG MAN OF SIXTY

'In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by.'
--W. SHAKESPEARE.

3. I. SHE RETURNS FOR THE NEW SEASON

Twenty years had spread their films over the events which wound up with
the reunion of the second Avice and her husband; and the hoary peninsula
called an island looked just the same as before; though many who had
formerly projected their daily shadows upon its unrelieved summer
whiteness ceased now to disturb the colourless sunlight there.

The general change, nevertheless, was small. The silent ships came and
went from the wharf, the chisels clinked in the quarries; file after
file of whitey-brown horses, in strings of eight or ten, painfully
dragged down the hill the square blocks of stone on the antediluvian
wooden wheels just as usual. The lightship winked every night from the
quicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through its
eye-glass on the ship. The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank
had been repeated ever since at each tide, but the pebbles remained
undevoured.

Men drank, smoked, and spat in the inns with only a little more
adulteration in their refreshments and a trifle less dialect in their
speech than of yore. But one figure had never been seen on the Channel
rock in the interval, the form of Pierston the sculptor, whose first use
of the chisel that rock had instigated.

He had lived abroad a great deal, and, in fact, at this very date he was
staying at an hotel in Rome. Though he had not once set eyes on Avice
since parting from her in the room with her firstborn, he had managed to
obtain tidings of her from time to time during the interval. In this way
Pierston learnt that, shortly after their resump