Anyway he was out of it, and Margaret Brandt was henceforth nothing to him. If he said it once he said it hundreds of times, as if the simple reiteration of so obvious a truth would make it one whit the truer, when his whole heart was clamouring that Margaret was all the worlds to him and the only thing in the world that he wanted. With an eye, perhaps, to his obvious lack of cheerfulness, his namesake and host suggested various diversions,--fishing for congers and rock-fish, a voyage round the island, a trip across to Herm, a day among the rabbits on. Brecqhou. But he wanted none of them. His life was flapping on a broken wing and all he wanted was to be left alone. In time the wound would heal, and he would take up his work again and find his solace in it. But wounds such as this are not healed in a day. It was raw and sore yet, the new skin had not had time to form. He recalled Lady Elspeth's dissatisfaction with his love-scenes, and thought, grimly, that now he could at all events enter fully into the feelings of the man who had lost the prize, and would be able to depict them to the life. If the choice had been left to him he would gladly have dispensed with all such knowledge to its profoundest depths, if only the prize had remained to him. But the choice had been Margaret's, and the prize was Charles Pixley's. If there was one thing he could have imagined without actual experience, it was how a man may feel when he loses. What he could not at present by any possibility conceive was--how it might feel to be the accepted lover of such a girl as Margaret Brandt. Confound her money! If it were not for that, Pixley would probably never have wanted to marry her. Money was answerable for half the ills of life, and the contrariness of woman for the other half. Confound money! Confound--Well, truly, his state of mind was not a happy one. X But there was something in the crisp Sark air that, by degrees and all unconsciously, braced both mind and body;--something broadening and uplifting in the wide free outlook from every headland; something restorative of the grip of life in the rush and roar of the mighty waves and the silent endurance of the rocks; something so large and aloof and restful in the wide sweep of sea and sky; something so hopeful and regenerative in the glorious exuberance of the spring--the flaming gorse, the mystic stretches of bluebells, the sunny sweeps of primroses, the soft uncurlings of the bracken, the bursting life of the hedgerows, the joyous songs of the larks--that presently, and in due season, earthly worries began to fall back into their proper places below the horizon, and a new Graeme--a Graeme born of Sark and Trouble--looked out of the old Graeme eyes and began to contemplate life from new points of view.