"Do you think I can be lonely while I hear the surge of that great ocean upon my shore?" he demanded. "Do you think I miss the friendships which so often bring sorrow in their wake while I can conjure up from the past the most glorious friends the world has ever known, visit with them, argue over my pet theories, and give them all this setting here whose counterpart can never be surpassed?" She smiled sadly in reply. "You have built your life upon the same basis as this island itself," she said--"upon the foundations of what is dead and past. You have argued with yourself until you have come to believe the fallacy you preach--that you, an Anglo-Saxon, can be content with such a life as this. Are you true to your responsibilities? Are you--" "What do I owe the world?" he interrupted. "I ask from it nothing but peace and solitude, and surely even the most insignificant has a right to that without incurring responsibilities. Why, Marian, I stand here upon this Point, as the little steamers leave their trail of smoke behind them, and thank God that for one day, three days, a week, we are cut off from the world. There is nothing I love so much as this separation from my fellow-men." "Then how fortunate, after all--" she began, but he interrupted her. "That is another story," he insisted. "I am speaking of what life means to me to-day, not what it might have meant under other circumstances." They strolled slowly back into the garden and settled themselves upon a stone seat which commanded a superb view of the surrounding country. It was her heart rather than her eyes which controlled Marian now, and she saw before her nothing but this man-grown boy, who at an earlier time in her life had exercised an absorbing influence upon her. It was her heart, still loyal to the friendship which remained, struggling to find the right word which should start in motion the machinery to bring the latent potentiality into action. "Your ideas are no different now than then," she said at length, "except that time has intensified them. You used to compare what you found in books with what you found in life, to the distinct disadvantage of the realities." "Yes," Hamlen admitted; "and it is just as true to-day." "Do you know why?" she demanded pointedly. "Because life is so full of insincerity." "No," she protested, "you are wrong, absolutely wrong. The real reason lies in you. You have always given of yourself in your intellectual pursuits, and have received in kind. In your relations with life you have never given of yourself, and again you have received in kind. Philip, Philip! why don't you study yourself as you do your books, and even now learn the lesson you need to know?" "Was that why--back there--" he began. She paused for a moment as the conversation took her back to the earlier days.