dy and soul as with some curative ray beyond the ultra violet. It
shot, through his worn frame, life and abounding health, making of him
for a magical moment more than the man he had been a year ago. But it
was only a moment; indeed, less than a moment. For it did not take him
sixty seconds to remember _how_ he had heard of Barbara's marriage to
her cousin Captain d'Arcy. Walter Severne the airman had said that her
wedding had taken place on the same day with his own. Severne had
blamed her. Every word he had said was branded on Denin's brain. There
could be no mistake. Whatever the motive might be for signing herself
Barbara Denin, she was in all certainty d'Arcy's wife.

With the violent reaction of feeling came a sense of physical
disintegration. A heavy fatigue that weighted his heart and turned his
bones to iron followed the brief buoyancy of spirit. Yet he could not
rest. He had to walk, to keep in constant movement, to escape some
tidal wave which threatened suddenly to engulf his soul. He passed out
from the cool shadow of the balcony into the blaze of sunlight and
drank in the hot perfume of the flowers. At the end of a path a tall
cypress held its black, burnt-out torch high against the sky. Denin
went and leaned against it; doubly glad of his loneliness in this
refuge he had found, and thankful that none but the trees and flowers
of his garden could see him in his weakness and his pain.

The dark cypress he looked up to seemed to have gone through fire and
to have triumphed over death. Denin felt a kind of kinship with it,
wishing that from the tree and from all nature calmness and strength
might pass into his spirit. He imagined that he could hear the rushing
of sap deep under the rough bark. Generations of joys and sorrows had
come and gone since the tree was young, and had vanished, leaving no
more trace than sun or storm. So it would be with what he was suffering
now. The things that mattered in the life of this earth were strength
and steadfastness. Denin prayed for them, a voiceless prayer to Nature.

When he grew calmer he walked again, and lifted up his face to the sun.
"I'll answer her letter," he thought. It seemed strange to him now,
after the shock of what had happened, that when the letters began to
come, he had never imagined himself receiving one from Barbara. He had
had the book published in order that it might have some chance of
reaching her, of helping her; yet the proof that she had been