his Great Emotion, life and
death caught something of the truth and dignity of that memorable
evening--the sounds of life and the distance of death. If he was not to
live with Joan he would die with her. There was, to him, in the state
of mind into which this absorbing passion had worked him, no
alternative. Love, that he had made his lodestar in early youth and
sought in vain, had come at last. Marriage, convention, obligations,
responsibility, balance and even sanity mattered nothing. They were
swept like chaff before this sex-storm. Ten years of dreams were
epitomized in Joan. She was the ideal that he had placed on the secret
altar of his soul. She struck, all vibrant with youth, the one poetic
note that was hidden in his character behind vanity and sloth, cynicism
and the ingrained belief that whatever he desired he must have. And as
he drove away from Easthampton and the Hosack house he left behind him
Alice and all that she was and meant. She receded from his mind like
the white cliffs of a shore to which he never intended to return. He
was happier than he had ever been. In his curious exaltation, life,
with its tips and downs, its pettiness, its monotony, lay far below
him, as the moving panorama of land does to a flying man. His head was
clear, his plan definite. He felt years younger--almost boyish.
Laughter came easy--the sort of reasonless laughter that comes to tired
men as they start out on a holiday. He saw the strangeness of it all
with some wonder and much triumph. The Gilbert Palgrave who had been
molded by money and inertia and autocracy was discarded, and the man
with Joan at his side was the young Gilbert whom he had caught sight of
that night in Paris, when, on his way home under the stars, Joan, with
her brown hair and laughing eyes, tip-tilted nose and the spirit of
spring in her breath, had come out of his inner consciousness and
established herself like a shape in a dream.

His heart turned when he looked at Joan's face. Was its unusual gravity
due to the fact that she had come to the end of fooling--that she, too,
had sensed the finality or the beginning? He thought so. He believed
so. She looked younger than ever, but sweeter, less flippant, less
triumphantly irresponsible. She sat, like a child, with her hands in
her lap, her mouth soft, an odd wistfulness in her eyes with their long
curling lashes. A black straight-brimmed straw hat sat well down on her
small head and put a shadow on her f