Yes, he would go, and it interested Mr. Spokesly to see how little his tender and beautiful picture of two old people "going down the hill together" appealed to him. With a sudden cleavage in the dull mistiness which had possessed his heart for so long, he saw that there was something in life which they had missed. He saw that if a man sets so low a mark, and attains it by the aid of a craven rectitude and animal cunning, he will miss the real glory and crown of life, which by no means implies victory. He was prepared to admit he had not done a great deal with his own life so far. But he was laying a new course. The night he received his instructions to depart he walked down to the river and along the embankment to his hotel with a novel exaltation of spirit. The taste of life was coming back. He saw, in imagination, that new place to which he was bound, a tiny settlement concealed within the secure recesses of a huge tropical harbour. He saw the jetty, with its two red lights by the pipe-line and the verandahed houses behind the groves of Indian laurel. He saw the mountains beyond the clear water purple and black against the sunset or floating above the mist in the crystal atmosphere of the dawn. He saw the wide clean space of matted floors and the hammock where he would lie and watch the incandescent insects moving through the night air. He saw himself there, an integral part of an orderly and reasonable existence. He had no intention of wasting his life, but he saw that he must have time and quiet to find his bearings and make those necessary affiliations with society without which a man is rootless driftage. He saw that the lines which had hitherto held him to the shore had been spurious and rotten and had parted at the first tension. There was time yet. What was it the elderly lieutenant had called her? "A mill-stone round your neck all your life." No, he could not take that view. He did not regret that supreme experience of his life. He recalled the swift derisive gesture she had once flung at him as she spurned his reiterated fidelity: "You learn from me, to go back to an Englishwoman." Even now he delighted in the splendid memory of her charm, her delicious languors and moments of melting tenderness, her anger and sometimes smouldering rage. No, he did not regret. It was something achieved, something that would be part of him for ever. He could go forward now into the future, armed with knowledge and the austere prudence that is the heritage of an emotional defeat. He looked out across the river and saw the quick glow of an opened cupola in a foundry on the Surrey Side. There was a faint smile on his face, an expression of resolution, as though in imagination he were already in his island home, watching the glow of a cane-fire in a distant valley. * * * * *