e cannot cheat ourselves with a
tale that we shall not grow old, but we are able to believe, however
vainly, that our work will live."

"Yes," she admitted, "you are wise in your vanity--or would be, were it
wisdom to shut one's eyes to fate. Let us grant that men are happier
than women--than childless women at any rate. You do not know what it
is to be a singer, for instance; to wake up each morning to a fear 'Has
my voice gone? One of these days it will certainly go, but--Lord, not
yet!' We must build on what we have. We must cling to our youth,
knowing that after our youth comes darkness. No, sir, I do not blame
men for setting up their rest upon what they do rather than upon
ourselves; but for setting it upon that part of their work which, being
the more visible, the more visibly decays."

The Commandant pondered while his eyes studied the grass-grown
platform. He shook his head. "You puzzle me, Miss Vashti," he
confessed.

"Why, sir, you have been mooning around these fortifications quite as
though they had made up your life and their ruins stood for your broken
purposes; whereas for fifteen years you have been Governor of the
Islands and my sister tells me you are a good man. Surely, then, your
real life has lain in the justice you have done, the wrongs you have
righted, the trust you have built up in the people's hearts, and not in
these decaying walls which no enemy ever threatened in your time nor
for a hundred years before you came."

But again the Commandant shook his head.

"I say nothing of the first few years," he answered slowly. "I liked
the people and I tried to do justice. But all that has passed out of my
control. The Lord Proprietor takes everything into his own hands."

"Still on the Council--" she urged.

"I am no longer a member of the Council."

"You resigned? Why?"

"Because I saw that Sir Caesar was bent on humiliating me; and he had
the power."

Vashti prised at a loose stone from the wall with the point of her
sunshade.

"I have read somewhere," she said, after a pause, "that no wise man
should avoid being a magistrate, because it is wrong to refuse help to
those who need it, and equally wrong to stand aside and let worse men
govern ill."

"The Lord Proprietor does not govern ill. He likes his own way; but he
is a just man--" The Commandant hesitated and paused.

"A just man until you happen to thwart him. Is that what you were going
to say?"

"No," he answered, smiling. "