hor, and I can see nothing but their lonely eyes, I
would give anything to be able to fly round them like a gull and peep
into their cabins. Do they affect you like that?"

Palgrave wasn't listening to her. It was enough to look at her and
refresh his memory. She had been more than ever in his blood all these
weeks. She was like water in a desert or sunlight to a man who comes up
from a mine. He had found her again and he thanked whatever god he
recognized for that, but he was forced to realize from her
imperturbable coolness and unaffected ease that she was farther away
from him than ever. To one of his temperament and schooling this was
hard to bear with any sort of self-control. The fact that he wanted her
of all the creatures on earth, that she, alone among women, had touched
the fuse of his desire, and that, knowing this, she could sit there a
few inches from his lips and put a hundred miles between them, maddened
him, from whom nothing hitherto had been impossible.

"Have I got to begin all over again?" he asked, with a sort of
petulance.

"Begin what, Gilbert?" There was great satisfaction in playing with one
who thought that he had only to touch a bell to bring the moon and the
sun and the stars to his bidding.

"Good God," he cried out. "You're like wet sand on which a man expects
to find yesterday's footmarks. Hasn't anything of me and the things
I've said to you remained in your memory?"

"Of course," she said. "I shall never forget the night you took me to
the Brevoort, for instance, and supplied the key to all the people with
unkempt hair and comic ties."

Some one on the beach below shot out a low whistle.

A little thrill ran through Joan. In ten minutes, perhaps less, she
would be dancing once more to the lunatic medley of a Jazz band,
dancing with a boy who gave her all that she needed of him and asked
absolutely nothing of her; dancing among people who were less than the
dust in the scheme of things, so far as she was concerned, except to
give movement and animation to the room and to be steered through. That
was the right attitude towards life and its millions, she told herself.
As salt was to an egg so was the element of false romance to this Golf
Club dance. In a minute she would get rid of Palgrave, yes, even the
fastidious Gilbert Palgrave, who had never been able quite to disguise
the fact that his love for her was something of a condescension; she
would fly in the face of the unwritten l