“I don’t know, exactly. You see, I’ve never had a house. But people seem to have found uses for them. I would settle down in mine and await developments. In the meantime, I could live in it. People do, don’t they?” She laughed. “Yes. People do.... But won’t you be lonely in such a big house?” “No,” he said, “I sha’n’t be lonely. Not in this house! If I am I shall go talk to the cook.” They looked at each other, smiling, and remembering the first morning of their marriage. And for a moment Felix felt that they had drawn nearer than they had ever been in their lives—as if in this foolish dream of house-building he had by some inspired accident touched upon the secret of happiness.... And then, in his doubting mind, there rose the fear that this was an emotion shared only in play. It was too trivial a thing to bear the burden of his need of reassurance. No, the hurts which they had inflicted upon each other could not be healed by a jest.... For another moment their gaze still met, suspiciously, as he sought to surprise in her eyes the thoughts, the wishes, that lay mockingly hidden behind that impenetrable curtain. And then they looked away. The moment in which they had seemed to understand each other had vanished, leaving him with the certainty that it had never existed. “Come,” Rose-Ann cried gaily, “we must go on our picnic.” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ LXIV. In Earnest 1 SHE had never seemed more dazzling to him, and more remote, than in the hours that followed. They lay on the beach and watched the sunset, and wandered arm in arm through the brief twilight into the darkness. She was happy; and her happiness was a mockery to him. She was tender and passionate—and in that very excess of tenderness and passion seemed to confess to him that this was the end. She was playing at marriage. In the vast night the moon rose slowly behind the hills, unseen but palely tinging the sky. They went past stray bonfires far up the shore until they could see it, a slender crescent, cradled between two hills. Its light faintly touched the edges of the waves with silver. “What would it be like,” Rose-Ann wondered, “to bathe in icy moonlight? Shall we?” He remembered the time at Woods Point, the first morning of their marriage when she had slipped from their warm bed while he slept, to plunge into the snow. He remembered the sudden loneliness with which he had awakened, and her naked footprints in the snow.... It seemed profoundly characteristic of all her strangeness. What other woman in the world would have left, at dawn, the bed of happy love, to keep such an icy tryst! It was like their whole married life: the warmth of mere human happiness had not satisfied her; she must go out into the bleak strange arctic spaces of emotion; and he must go, too.... Well, let her keep her cold assignation with the moonlight alone, this time!