and I asked her if there would be
any livery stable open at that hour, for it was not more
than four o'clock. She did not know, of course, what a
livery stable was and told me that we must either go in a
boat or walk. So we walked. The sun rose while we were
walking. I think this is all you wanted.

There you have it! Could anything be simpler? "I remember there were
any amount of stars ... You know she never talked much."--Oh, Roger,
Roger! Must you always have the doing and I the telling? Even to this
day, though I would cut off this hand for you, I am jealous of you.
"The sun rose while we were walking"! Ah me, to walk with Margarita
through the dawn! She was the very dawn of life herself, untarnished,
unfatigued, unashamed. To me who have known her, other women are as
pictures in a gallery--lovely pictures, many of them, but a little
faded and fingermarked, somehow.

We shall have to take that walk for granted. I know that it consisted
of a quarter-mile of sleeping village, three quarters of a mile of
scattered houses, two miles of widely separated farms and then two
last miles of bayberry, salt meadow, coarse grass, rocky sand and
blue, inrolling seas. I know how the salty, strengthening air blew
Roger's lungs clean of the frightful murk of the car, how the strange,
stunted windrocked trees gave an odd, unreal air of Japan to that
bleak shore; I can half close my eyes now and lo, Atami and her
thundering, surf-swept beach broadens out before me, and the breakers
as they come pounding in, chase--not the withered, monkeylike old
priest who searches endlessly for something in the sea-weed, girding
his clean, faded robe above his bare sticks of legs--but Margarita and
me. The camphor trees lose their lacquered green and turn to
distant chestnut; the scarlet lily fades to a dull rose marsh flower;
the lines of the temple are only quaintly-eaved rocks and ledges, and
I am over seas again. I wonder if that is the reason I love this place
so? But there were no geyser baths there and I had no rheumatism then!
_Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe_--even the sciatic nerve, we will
hope.

[Illustration: THE TALL, GAUNT, SILENT WOMAN ... STRIDING THROUGH THE
PASTURES]

Well, then, after they had made what Roger with his usual accuracy in
such matters took for nearly five miles, it occurred to him to ask
Margarita how it was that she knew her way so well, for she went
through pastures, broken walls,