ace. The slim roundness of her arms
showed through the white silk shirt, and her low collar proved all the
beauty of her throat and neck. She looked more than ever unplucked,
untouched, like a rosebud.

On the tip of his tongue there were words of adoration, not fastidious
and carefully chosen, but simple, elemental words such as a farmhand
might blunder out in the deep shadow of a lane, after dark. But he held
them back. He would wait until after they had dined together and all
round them there were silence and solitude. He drove still more slowly
in order to give the two Japanese servants time to carry out his
instructions and remove themselves. That cottage, which he had bought
on the spur of the moment, fitted out with elaborate care and used only
twice, for two weeks since, was to justify itself, after all. Who
knows? He might have bought it two years before under an inspiration.
Even then, months and months before he met Joan or knew of her
existence, this very evening might have been mapped out He was a
fatalist, and it fell into his creed to think so.

He didn't wonder why Joan was silent or ask himself jealously of what
she was thinking. He chose to believe that she had arrived at the end
of impishness, had grown weary of Harry Oldershaw and his cubbish ways
and had turned to himself naturally and with relief, choosing her
moment with the uncanny intuition that is the gift of women. She was
only just in time. To-morrow would have found him following the
faithful Alice on her forlorn hope--the incurable man.

It was only when they turned into the narrow sandy road that was within
a quarter of a mile of the club at Devon that Joan came out of the
numbness that had settled upon her and recognized things that were
stamped with the marks of an afternoon that was never to be forgotten.
Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.

"But why are you coming this way?" she asked, drawing back into her
seat.

"Because my cottage is just here," said Gilbert.

"At Devon?"

"Yes. Why not? I had a fancy for playing hermit from time to time. I
saw the sun set behind the water,--a Byron sunset,--and in the hope of
seeing just such another I bought this shack. I did those things once
for want of something better. Look at it," he said, and turned the car
through a rustic gate, alive with honeysuckle.

It was a bungalow, put up on a space cleared among a wood of young
trees that was carpeted with ferns. It might have been b