y have you not spoken of this before?" I asked, deeply stirred.

He made a gesture, too American to be called a shrug. He said nothing,
watching a large bubble rise through the pure, brown-green water, float
an instant on the surface, then vanish with the abrupt completeness of a
miniature explosion. I watched also, with an always fresh interest in
the pretty phenomenon. Then I repeated my question, rather impatiently
as I considered what a relief his companionship in experience would have
afforded all these weeks.

"Why not, Vere?"

"Mr. Locke, I don't like to keep saying that you never exactly got used
to me as your cousin's husband," he reluctantly replied. "But I can see
it's a kind of surprise to you right along that I don't break down or
break out in some fashion. Of course I haven't known that you were
meeting queer times, too! If you hadn't been through any of this, what
would you have thought if I'd come to you with stories of the place
being haunted by something nobody could see? You would have judged I was
a liar, trying to fix up an excuse for getting away from the work here
and shoving off. I don't want to go away. I don't intend to go. I can't
see any need of it for Phil and me. But--and this is the advice you
spoke of! I think you ought to leave and leave now. It's little better
than suicide to stay."

"And abandon Desire Michell?"

He turned his dark observant eyes toward me.

"If I said yes, you wouldn't do it. Phil and I will take care of the
young lady, if she will let us. Couldn't a note be left for her, telling
her to come to us?"

I shook my head.

"She would not come. Now, less than ever----" I broke off, shot with
sharp self-reproach at the memory of how I had driven her from me last
night.

"You won't be any help to her if you're dead," he bluntly retorted.

At that I rose and walked a few paces to knock out my post-breakfast
pipe against an apple-tree. I was not so sure that he was right,
self-evident as his statement appeared. Ideas moved confusedly in my
mind, convictions somehow impressed when that golden-bronze spot of
light so gently came to rest above my heart when I last stood at the
Barrier; the light so like the bright imagined head of Desire. To fly
from my place now, herded like a cowardly sheep by the Thing of the
Frontier, would that not be to thrust her away to save myself?

No! Not myself, my life!

I had the answer now. I walked back to Vere and took my seat again