"That's the excitement of it. I've been--land-locked--for years. Oh, beached--whatever's your best metaphor for somebody wasting all this fine life!" "Do you suppose you made your husband happy?" The question was unexpected. But there was no side of a situation too forlorn for Stephen's notice. "I really don't know," said Winnie. "I always seemed to be rather--well, rather a minor interest." "I expect not--I really expect not, you know." "Supposing I was, or supposing I wasn't--what does it amount to?" "I was only just looking at it from his point of view for a minute." "Did he make me happy?" "Oh, certainly the thing wasn't successful all round," Stephen hastily conceded. "He said marriage wasn't invented solely to make people happy." "Well, I suppose he's got an argument there. But you probably thought that the institution might chuck in a little more of that ingredient incidentally?" "Rather my feeling--yes. You put things well too, now and then, Stephen." "You suffer under the disadvantage of being a very attractive woman." "We must bear our infirmities with patience, mustn't we?" She was this evening in a rare vein of excited pleasure, gay, challenging, admirably provoking, exulting in her freedom, dangling before her own dazzled eyes all its possibilities. Stephen gave a deep chuckle. "I think I'll go in and tell Tora that I'm infernally in love with you," he remarked, rising from his chair. "It would be awfully amusing to hear what she says. But--are you?" A rolling laugh, full of applause, not empty of pity, rumbled over the lawn as Stephen walked back to the house. No, Stephen was not in love with her; that was certain. He admitted every conceivable doubt as to his duty, but harboured none as to his inclination. That trait of his might, to Winnie's present mood, have been vexatious had he chanced to be the only man in the world, or even the only one in or near Shaylor's Patch. Winnie sat in the twilight, smiling roguishly. She had no fears for herself; far less had she formed any designs. She was simply in joyful rebound from long suppression. Her spirit demanded plenty of fun, with perhaps a spice of mischief--mischief really harmless. So much seemed to her a debt long overdue from life and the world. Yet peril was there, unseen by herself. For there is peril when longings for fun and mischief centre persistently round one figure, finding in it, and in it only, their imagined realization.