Triona, light-hearted, gave himself up to the pleasure of this new existence. He found in it stimulus to work, being in touch with the thought and the art of the moment. The newness of his Odyssey having worn off, he was no longer compelled to dilate on his extraordinary adventures; people, growing unconsciously impatient of the realistic details of the late cataclysm, conspired to regard him more as a writer than as a heroic personage; wherein he experienced mighty relief. He could talk of other things than the habits of the dwellers round Lake Baikal and the amenities of Bolshevik prisons. When conversation drifted into such channels, he employed a craftiness of escape which he had amused himself to develop. Freed from the obsession of the little black book, he regarded his Russian life as a phase remote, as a tale that was told. His facile temperament put the whole matter behind him. He lived for the future, when he should be the acknowledged English Master of Romance, and when Olivia’s burning faith in his genius should be justified. He threw off memories of Ellen and the kitchen chair and went his way, a man radiant with happiness. Each day intensified the wonder of his wife. From the lips and from the writings of fools and philosophers he had heard of the perils of the first year of marriage; of the personal equations that seemed impossible of simultaneous solution; of the misunderstandings, cross-purposes, quarrels inevitable to the attempt; of the hidden snags of feminine unreason that shipwrecked logical procedure; of the love-rasping persistence of tricks of manner or speech which either had to be violently broken or to be endured in suffering sullenness. At both fools and philosophers he mocked. A fiction, this dogma of inescapable sex warfare. Never for a second had a cloud arisen on their horizon. The flawlessness of Olivia he accepted as an axiom. Equally axiomatic was his own faultiness. In their daily lives he was aware of his thousand lapses from her standard of grace, when John Briggs happened to catch Alexis Triona at unguarded moments and threw him from his seat. But, in a flash, the instinctive, the super-instinctive, the nothing less than Divine hand, was stretched out to restore him to his throne. As a guide to conduct she became his conscience. Work and love and growing friendship filled his care-free days. His novel was running serially in a weekly and attracting attention. It would be published in book-form early in the New Year, and the publishers had no doubt of its success. All was well with the world.