y girl, though."

"Do you know," said Fanny, rising from beneath the big parasol, "the
waiter didn't bring the raspberries. No matter now, though. I must go
and find mother. This is no place for her to be out alone."

CHAPTER VIII

TWO IN A TURRET

From a back gallery of the Casino a narrow stair leads to a tower. Up
that stair Annandale one afternoon invited Fanny Price.

A fortnight had gone, two weeks of dressing and undressing, of
dinners, dances and dips; a succession of mellow mornings; long, green
afternoons, dusks stabbed by sudden stars and nights lit by a moon
that painted the ocean, penetrated the shadows, checkered the
underbrush with silver spots.

But now, though the mornings were as mellow and the afternoons as
green, though in the air the same madness subsisted and the nights
were as languid as before, verandas were emptying, there were wide
spaces where once were thick crowds. The end of the season had come.

In the procession of these things Annandale had put the North Woods
from him; he had put, too, the thought of journeying abroad. With
them he had put also any hope that Sylvia would signal him back.

For awhile the hope had persisted, as the light of a candle persists.
Then it had dwindled, flickered and sunk. That is the way with hope.
Though sometimes it is snuffed. You are in darkness. But through that
darkness occasionally another light will be upheld. It may not,
perhaps, be intended for you, but it may enable you to see.

Aided by another light, Annandale had begun to discern his way. He
should, of course, have remained in darkness. To darkness, were this
fiction, he would be condemned. But this is not fiction. The drama
with which these pages deal is documented from life. It was Fanny who
held the light.

During the month that had gone he had been almost constantly at her
side. The fact that one light may be replaced by another had not at
first occurred to him. Presently the ease with which such substitution
can be effected had mystified him very much. He was not prepared for
anything of the kind. He had arranged to be a gloomy, disappointed
man. He kept telling himself that if Sylvia had stuck to him he would
have been true to her his whole life through. But she had not stuck to
him, and the withdrawal of herself had left existence so empty that,
unknown even to him, Nature had been filling the vacuum which she
abhors.

In this, Nature had been greatly aided. Fanny Pri