Very few of the people at preset acquainted with the brilliant, pleasantly eccentric architect, knew that he had been married before. But of course the handful of old Bohemian comrades whom he had faithfully kept from out of the past, were well aware of the fact. They were not likely to forget it either, for whenever it was mentioned, each of them at once remembered that which at the time it had happened, Sherston had every reason to tell rather than to conceal, namely, that the woman who had been his wife had gone down with the Titanic. But how long ago that now seemed! The outbreak of war, which caused so much unmerited misfortune to English artists and their like, and which at one moment had threatened to wreck his own successful opening career, had brought to Shirley Sherston a piece of marvelous good fortune.. Early in the memorable August, 1914, at a time when the fabric of his life and work seemed shattered, and when the lameness which he had so triumphantly coped with during his grown up life as to cause those about him scarcely to know it was there, made it out of the question for him to respond to his country's first call for men, the architect happened to run across James Pomeroy, a cultivated millionaire with whom he had once had a slight business relation. Acting on a kindly impulse which even now Mr. Pomeroy hardly knew whether to remember with pleasure or regret, the older man had pressed the younger to spend a week in a country house which he had taken for the summer near London. That was now fourteen months ago, but Sherston, standing there, remembered as if it had happened yesterday, his first sight of the girl who was to become his wife to-morrow. Helen Pomeroy had been standing on a brick path bordered with holly hocks, and she had smiled, a little shyly and gravely, at her father's rather eccentric-looking guest. But on that war-summer morning she had appeared to the stranger as does a mirage of spring water to a man who is dying of thirst in the desert. Up to that time Sherston had always supposed himself to be attracted to small women. He was a big, fair man, with loosely hung limbs, and his wife--poor little baggage--had been a tiny creature, vixenish at her worst, kittenish at her best. But Helen Pomeroy was tall, with the noble proportions and tapering limbs of a goddess, and gradually--not for some time, for all social life was dislocated in England during that strange summer--Sherston became aware, with a kind of angry revolt of soul, that he was but one of many worshipers at the shrine.