"All the time I am happy," said he. "And you're happy now?" she asked. "Absolutely. I want nothing more. All this week I could have said to every moment: 'Stay, thou art fair.' And, oh! how fair you are, Madge. Smile, please--no, not the sad smile with all the sorrows of the world behind it." Madge ceased smiling altogether. "Oh, Evelyn, I am so happy, too!" she said. "But I can't forget all the scaffolding, as it were, in which our house of love was built, which now lies scattered about in bits." Evelyn sat up quickly, demolishing the altar he had made with such care. "Ah! don't think of that," he said. "We agreed that what has happened had to happen. Now pity and sorrow when you can't help in any way seems to me a wasted thing." "But if you can't help pitying and being sorry?" she asked. Evelyn gave a little click of impatience. "You must go on trying till you do help it," he said. "Of course, if one dwells on the matter, one is sorry for Philip; I am awfully sorry for Philip when I think of him. I hate the idea of anybody being wounded and hurt as he must have been, and since he was my friend, it is the more distressing. Only it is an effort for me to think of him at all. I can only think of one person, and of one thing--you and my love for you." This time Madge's smile was more satisfactory, and with his bright eager eyes he looked at her as the eagle to the sun. "Ah, you are absolutely adorable!" he cried. * * * * * The wind, such as there was of it, had veered round at the time of high tide, and blew no longer off the sea, but breathed gently from the land. A mile away on the right were the tall, dun-coloured houses of Paris-plage, perched at the edge of the sea, and the sands there were dotted with the costumes of the bathers, like polychromatic ants who crawled about the beach. The sea itself was full of shifting greens and blues, and far out a fleet of boats like grey-winged gulls hovered, fishing. Even the shrill ecstasies of the bathers of Paris-plage, whose bathing appeared to be of a partial description, but who made up for that by dancing in the ripples, and splashing each other with inimitable French gaiety, were inaudible here; nothing stirred but the light, noiseless wind, warm with its passage over the sand-dunes, and faintly aromatic with the pungent scent of the fir-woods over which its pleasant path had lain. All things paused in this hour of the glory of the fulfilled noontide, that seemed equally remote from both past and future, so splendid and so real was the one present moment. If there had been hurricane in the morning, it was forgotten now; if there was to be a tempest to-night, it would be time to think about tempests when the winds began to blow, and it was mere futility to waste a moment of what was so perfect in contemplation, whether retrospective or anticipatory, of what had been or yet might be. There was just the hushed murmur of