The further ride to Cottarsport followed the sea--a brilliant serene blue, fretted on the landward side by innumerable bare promontories, hideous towns and factories, but bowed in a far unbroken arc at the immaculate horizon. She left the train for a hilly cluster of houses, gray and low like the rock everywhere apparent, dropping to a harbor that bore a company of motionless boats with half-spread drying sails. The day was at noon, and the sky, blue like the sea, held, still as the anchored schooners, faint, chalky symmetrical clouds. Linda found the Common without guidance; and at once saw, on its immovable base of rugged granite, the bronze statue of Simon Downige. It stood well in advance of what, evidently, was the court-house, the white steeple Dodge had described. She found a bench by a path in the thin grass; and there, her gloved hands folded, at rest in her lap, her gaze and longing were lifted to the fixed aspiration. From where she sat the seated figure was projected against the sky; Simon's face was turned toward the west; the West that, for him, was the future, but which for Linda represented all the past. This conviction flooded her with unutterable sadness. A sense of failure weighed on her, no less heavy for the fact that it was perpetually vague. Her thoughts gathered about Dodge himself; and she recalled the curious vividness of his vision of her as a child, perhaps ten. She, too, tried to remember that time and age. It was almost in her grasp, but her realization was spoiled by absurd mental fragments--the familiar illusion of a leopard and a rider with bright hair, a forest with the ascending voices of angels, and an ominous squat figure with a slowly nodding plumed head. The vista of a hotel returned, a fleet recollection of marble columns and a wide red carpet ... the white gleam and carbolized smell of a drug-store ... a thick magazine in a brown cover. These, changed into emotions of mingled joy and pain, shifted in bright or dim colors and sensations. There was a slow heavy plodding of feet, now above her head, the passage of a carried weight; and, in a flash of perception, she knew it was a coffin. She raised her clasped hands to her breast, crying into the sunny silence, to the figure of Simon Downige lost in dream: “He died that night, at the Boscombe, after he had told me about the meadows with silk tents--” Her memory, thrilling with the echoed miraculous chord of the child of ten, sitting gravely, alone, among the shrill satins and caustic voices of a feminine throng, was complete. She saw herself, Linda Condon, as objectively as Pleydon's described vision: there was a large bow on her straight black hair, and, from under the bang, her gaze was clear and wondering. How marvelously young she was! The vindictive curiosity of the questioning women, intent on their rings, brought out her eager defense of her mother, the effort to explain away the ugly fact that--that Mr. Jasper was married.