Maradick did not patronise, did not check that American spontaneity with traditional caution as so many Englishmen do; he seemed to like Harkness as truly as Harkness liked him. Westcott had to go. The other American also departed, but Maradick and Harkness sat on there, amused, and even absorbed. "If I am keeping you----" Harkness said suddenly, some of his shyness for a moment returning. "Not at all," Maradick answered. "I have nothing urgent this afternoon. I've got the very place for you, I believe." They had been speaking of places. Maradick had travelled, and together they found some of the smaller places that they both knew and loved--Dragör on the sea beyond Copenhagen, the woods north of Helsingfors, the beaches of Ischia, the enchantment of Girgente with the white goats moving over carpets of flowers through the ruined temples, the silence and mystery of Mull. He knew America too--the places that foreigners never knew; the teeth-shaped mountains at Las Cruces, the lovely curve of Tacoma, the little humped-up hill of Syracuse, the purple horizons beyond Nashville, the lone lake shore of Marquette---- "And then in this country there is Treliss," he said softly, staring in front of him. "Treliss?" Harkness repeated after him, liking the name. "Yes. In North Cornwall. A beautiful place." He paused--sighed. "I was there more than ten years ago. I shall never go back." "Why not?" "I liked it too well. I daresay they've spoiled it now as they have many others. Thanks to wretched novelists, the railway company and char-à-bancs, Cornwall and Glebeshire are ruined. No, I dare not go back." "Was it very beautiful?" Harkness asked. "Yes. Beautiful? Oh yes. Wonderful. But it wasn't that. Something happened to me there."[1] "So that you dare not go back?" "Yes. Dare is the word. I believe that the same thing would happen again. And I'm too old to stand it. In my case now it would be ludicrous. It was nearly ludicrous then." Harkness said nothing. "How old are you? If it isn't an impertinence----" "Thirty-five? You're young enough. I was forty. Have you ever noticed about places----?" He broke off. "I mean---- Well, you know with people. Suppose that you have been very intimate with some one and then you don't see him or her for years, and then you meet again--don't you find yourself suddenly producing the same set of thoughts, emotions, moods that have, perhaps, lain dormant for years, and that only this one person can call from you? And it is the same with places. Sometimes of course in the interval something has died in you or in them, and the second meeting produces nothing. Hands cross over a grave. But if those things haven't died how wonderful to find them all alive again after all those years, how you had forgotten the way they breathed and spoke and had their being; how interesting to find yourself drawn back again into that old current, perilous perhaps, but deep, real after all the shams----"