She obtruded upon his thoughts as sunlight enters a room past curtains waving in the breeze, while with the dour perversity of his queer nature he tried to shut her out. There were women about whom no one could cherish any illusions; with these Graeme Jakes was half contemptuously, half pityingly at ease. But in Claire Mayne he saw someone who approached so exquisitely to his ideal of womanhood that he dreaded disillusionment. Thus and thus must his goddess be fashioned, and the first word or act of hers that betrayed feet of clay would have filled him with bitterness and disappointment. However, as time went on, one after another he drew forth timidly from the secret hiding-place of his soul some fresh idealism; draping them about his conception of her, until the real and the imaginary woman blended into that dear, everlastingly inaccessible unreality which is all mankind's first love. Transports of this nature are usually apparent enough in the demeanour; but Graeme Jakes's oriental imperturbability of countenance gave not the slightest betrayal of the turmoil in his thoughts. Claire Mayne herself remained serenely unconscious of anything in the air more vibrant than a grave friendliness and a shy, half-reluctant admiration. She would not have been the normal, healthy young woman she was had she not thought about him a good deal. When the children were in bed and the stars made visible the dark outline of the hills opposite, she sat by her open window, with the tiny room behind her in darkness; there, chin in hand, she tried to assign him to some known category amongst her limited male acquaintances, and found the task difficult. Since girlhood her pet character in fiction had been Alan Breck; not for his swashbuckling gallantry, nor the efficient way with him in sword play, but because, as she herself put it, "he wanted looking after so dreadfully." Graeme Jakes, in some subtle way that eluded analysis, appealed to her in much the same manner. His clothes lacked buttons at times and his hair was generally dreadfully untidy. She would like, she thought, to brush his hair for him ... in a brisk, sisterly fashion. The tranquillity of her meditations would have been sorely disturbed could she have seen the object of her thoughts. Half a mile away, from a vantage point amid the dewy bracken, stood her devout lover, watching with all a lover's faculty for self-hypnotism a light burning behind a blind in one of the upper windows of the farm. Fondly he watched its orange glow through the darkness until it was abruptly extinguished, and returned home in a mood of exalted melancholy. Judge though how greater the melancholy had he realised the blind screened no other than the conjugal chamber of the farmer and his wife.... The days went by thus to merge into weeks, and the children's visit was fast drawing to a close. Graeme, too, had received orders to attend at the Admiralty for medical survey. The halcyon days were numbered.