It was a bad hour for this girl-child who had tried her wings too young.

And when Gilbert straightened up and gave thanks to God for the woman
who had never stirred him, but whose courage and tenderness had added
to his respect, he too turned towards the sea with its blank
horizon,--the sea upon which he was to be taken by his good wife for
rest and sleep, and there was Joan ... young, and slight and alluring,
with her back to him and her hands behind her back, and the mere sight
of her churned his blood again, and set his dull fire into flames. Once
more the old craving returned, the old madness revived, as it always
would when the sight and sound of her caught him, and all the common
sense and uncommon goodness of the little woman who had given him
comfort rose like smoke and was blown away.... To win this girl he
would sacrifice Alice and barter his soul. She was in his blood. She
was the living picture of his youthful vision. She only could satisfy
the Great Emotion.... There was the plan that he had forgotten,--the
lunatic plan from which, even in his most desperate moment, he had
drawn back, afraid,--to cajole her to the cottage away from which he
would send his servants; make, with doors and windows locked, one last
passionate appeal, and then, if mocked and held away, to take her with
him into death and hold her spirit in his arms.

To own himself beaten by this slip of a girl, to pack his traps and
leave her the field and sneak off like a beardless boy,--was that the
sort of way he did things who had had merely to raise his voice to hear
the approach of obsequious feet? ... Alice and the yacht and nothing
but sea to a blank horizon? He laughed to think of it. It was, in fact,
unthinkable.

He would put it to Joan in a different way this time. He would hide his
fire and be more like that cursed boy. That would be a new way. She
liked new things.

He left the summer house, only the roof of which was touched by the
last golden rays of the sun, and with curious cunning adopted a sort of
caricature of his old light manner. There was a queer jauntiness in his
walk as he made his way over the sand, carrying his hat, and a flippant
note in his voice when he arrived at her side.

"Waiting for your ship to come home?" he asked.

"It's come," she said.

"You have all the luck, don't you?"

She choked back a sob.

He saw the new look on her face. Something,--perhaps boredom,--perhaps
the constant companionship