“Something--inside you--says ‘No’?” He nodded. “Then I’m safe--quite safe.” This amazing childlikeness! “As your gods keep you,” he said. And she, with the embarrassment of one who returns a formal congratulation, answered: “And yours ... and yours, Nick. You’ve been good.” CHAPTER XXIII AN INSTANT FREE I Mr. Fane-Herbert decided to be in London with the spring. Ibble’s and Ordith’s were to remain independent, an arrangement of which both he and Nick Ordith saw the advantages, and which Aggett alone regretted wholeheartedly. Three weeks in Japan would complete Mr. Fane-Herbert’s work in the East, and to Tokio he went, with Margaret and her mother, at the end of February. Soon afterwards the _Pathshire_, having finished her refitting, sailed for Yokohama, and on the first Friday in March, John and Hugh, who had obtained week-end leave, arrived at Kamakura. That evening, when the hotel dinner was over, they sat together in the verandah of John’s bedroom. Below them stretched the lawn, its size exaggerated by the semi-darkness, its nearer edge, gloomy under the hotel’s shadow, slashed, where the gleam of windows fell upon it, with parallelograms of yellow light. “They come to-morrow,” Hugh said. “This will be the last that you’ll see of them before they leave for home.” Hugh nodded. “Margaret will be glad to go.” “Because Ordith stays?” “Partly--though I think she has cast off Ordith and the thought of him.... But she’ll be glad to be rid of the place and its associations. London will give her something else to think about.” “It’s almost incredible,” John said slowly, “that anyone out here now should be able to reach London within seventeen days. It seems further away than that.” “But I like the East,” Hugh protested. John laughed. “Good God!” he exclaimed, “so do I; but that has nothing to do with it.” He knocked out his pipe against the verandah rails. “Anyhow,” he said, “it’s a long lie-in to-morrow. Throw us a cigarette, Hugh.” He looked out across the lawn, across the broad belt of trees that stood between the garden and the beach. The sea was near--not that sea into which steel ships vomited their bilge, but the quiet sea of kissing sands and straight horizon which had been his first love. To-morrow did not matter; that darkness, those stars unsnared by sextants, that sea undivided into ranges, were suggestive of too many to-morrows, too many yesterdays. From an open window came voices and laughter, and the tinkle of a curtain being drawn. “Women,” Hugh said. John leaned over the rail. “That curtain has cut a patch of light out of the lawn. They’ll all go out one by one.” “Ours won’t--not yet. I’m not going to turn in for hours.”