uilt for a poet
or a novelist or just an ordinary muscular man who loved the water and
the silences and the sense of being on the edge of the world. It was a
bungalow of logs, roughly constructed and saved from utter banality by
being almost completely clothed in wisteria. It was admirably suited to
two men who found amusement in being primitive or to a romantic
honeymoon couple who wanted to fancy themselves on a desert island.
Better still, it might have been built for just that night, for
Palgrave and the girl who had taken shape in his one good dream.

Joan got out of the opulent car and watched Gilbert run it round to the
side of the house. There was no garage and not even a shed to give it
cover. Gilbert left it in the open, where it remained sulky and
supercilious, like a grand piano in an empty kitchen.

Joan had noticed this place twice that day--on the way out to find
Martin, and again on the way back from having heard the voice of the
girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of
a bottle. Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.

She wondered for a moment why no one came to open the door. Some one
was there because smoke was coming out of a chimney. But she refused to
be impatient. She had decided to give Gilbert one evening--to be nice
to him for one evening. He was terribly humble. Fate had dealt her a
smashing blow on the heart, and she had returned to consciousness
wistfully eager to make up at least to this man as well as she could
for the pain that she had caused. There was only this one evening in
which to do so because to-morrow she was going back to the old house,
the old people, the old servants and the old days, a failure, having
fallen off the Round-about, of which she had spoken so much. She was
going back a sort of cripple to the place from which she had escaped to
put the key into life; once more to read to her grandfather, to obey
the orders of her grandmother, to sleep in the warm kind arms of her
old bedroom, to go among the flowers and trees among which she had
grown up, herself old and tired and ashamed and broken-hearted, with
her gold ring burning into her finger and the constant vision of
Martin's shining armor lying bent and rusty before her eyes. What an
end to her great adventure!

Gilbert came up. He walked without his usual affectation of never
permitting anything to hurry him. All about him there was still a sort
of exaltation. His eyes were amazing