"God's sake, woman," the Speaker had said again, "let him go, and give him the allowance he asks for, and bother me no more about him." Turning westward the young travellers crossed the Atlantic; stood in awe on the ship's deck at their first sight of the new world, with its great statue of Liberty to guard its portals; passed over the breathless American continent, where life scours and roars through Time like a Neap tide on a shingly coast, casting up its pebbles like spray; then through Japan, where it flows silent and deep, like a mill race under adumbrous overgrowth; and so on through China, India and Egypt and back through Europe. It was a wonderful tour--to Gell like sitting in the bow of a boat where the tumult of life was for ever smiting his face in freshening waves; to Stowell (for the first months at least) like sitting miserably in the stern, with only the backwash visible that was carrying him away, with every heave of the sea, from something he had left and lost. But before long Stowell's heavy spirit regained its wings. Although he could not have admitted it even to himself without a sense of self-betrayal, Fenella Stanley's face, in the throng of other and nearer faces, became fainter day by day. There are no more infallible physicians for the heart-wounds inflicted by women than women themselves, and when a man is young, and in the first short period of virginal manhood, the world is full of them. So it came to pass that whatever else the young men saw that was wonderful and marvellous in the countries they passed through, they were always seeing women's eyes to light and warm them. And being handsome and winsome themselves their interest was rewarded according to the conditions--sometimes with a look, sometimes with a smile, and sometimes in the freer communities, with a handful of confetti or a bunch of spring flowers flung in their faces, or perhaps the tap of a light hand on their shoulders. Thus the thought of Fenella Stanley, steadily worn down in Victor's mind, became more and more remote as time and distance separated them, until at length there were moments when it seemed like a shadowy memory. Stowell and Gell were two years away, and when they returned home the old island seemed to them to have dwarfed and dwindled, the very mountains looking small and squat, and the insular affairs, which had once loomed large, to have become little, mean and almost foolish. "Now they'll get to work; you'll see they will," said Janet, and for the first weeks it looked as if they would. For the better prosecution of their profession, as well as to remove the sense of rivalry, they took chambers in different towns, Stowell in Old Post Office Place in Ramsey, and Gell in Preaching House Lane in Douglas---two outer rooms each for offices and two inner ones for residential apartments.