Again, the _mere_ brain said: "What have you done with your three years? The actress knew you better than you knew yourself. All your letters, and the spirit of your letters, have fallen into ruin before the first woman you meet down here in a dreamy, tropic isle. How can you--you, who have lived truly for a little while, and seemed to have felt the love that lifts--sink into the fragrant meshes of romance, through the beautiful eyes of a stranger to your world and to your ways? And what of Skylark, the lovely, the winged?..." And the soul of the man riding at its moorings in the bright calm of wisdom's anchorage, made laughing answer: "This is the Skylark--ah, not that Wyndam is Linster,--but this is the veiled queen who has waited so long for the House of Charter to be ready. This is the forever-fairy that puzzled the nights and mornings of the long-ago Charter boy. It was her wing that held the last dart of light in the gardens of boyhood before the frowning thunders came. It was her songs that made the youth's mind magic with lyrics, certain ones so very clear that they fitted into words. It was to find her dazzling brow that lured him to prodigious wanderings, until he fell fainting in the dust of other women's chariots. It was the rustling of her wings that he heard from without, when he lay in the Caverns of Devouring, where the twain, Flesh and Death, hold ghastly carnival; the flash of her wings again that lifted his eyes to the Rising Road. It was her spirit in the splendid East whose miracles of singing and shining made glorious, with creative touch, his hours by the garret window.... It was she of exquisite shoulder and starry eyes and radiant sympathies--before whom the boy, the man and the spirit, bowed in thankfulness yesterday...." And so he sat there thinking, thinking,--glimpsing the errant centuries in the same high light of memory that this very morning recurred--an hour or two ago, when he had walked with her through the mango-grove in the coolness following a dawn-shower that had washed the white weight of Pelée's ash-winter from the trees.... "What a chaos I must be," he murmured in dull anguish, "with the finest of my life plighted to a vision that is lost--while I linger desolate in the presence of wondrous reality!" ... Some one was moving and whispering in the little room across the court of the song-birds.... Peter Stock entered, his white hair and mustache dulled with ash; his eyes red and angry.