SOMEWHERE on the South Coast, screened from the vulgar by the trap of a huge watering-place, is a long, thin, sandy promontory sticking out to sea, like an innocent rib of wilderness. Here there is no fun of the fair, because there is no fair to provide the fun. There are no taverns, no boarding-houses, no lodgings. One exclusive little hotel rules the extreme tip of the tongue of land in consort with the miniature jetty and quay by which, in late exciting times, strange craft were moored, flying the white ensign and hoar with North Sea brine and deadly secrets. The rest of the spit is peppered with a score of little shy houses, each trying to hide itself from its neighbours, in the privacy of its own sandpit. If your house is on the more desirable side of it, you can look out over the vastness of the sea with the exhilarating certainty (if your temperament may thereby be exhilarated) that there is nothing but blue water between you and the coast of Africa. If your house is, less fortunately, on the other side, your view commands a spacious isle-studded harbour fringed by distant blue and mysterious hills. But it is given to any one to walk out of the back of his little hermitage, and, standing in the dividing road, to enjoy, in half a minute, both aspects at once. It is called esoterically by its frequenters “the Point,” so that the profane, map-searching, may not discover its whereabouts. Just high enough to be under the lee of a sand-hill, with its front windows and veranda staring at the African coast, some thousand miles away, stood the tiniest, most fragile and most absurd of the habitations. Its name was “Quien Sabe,” suggestive of an imaginative abandonment of search after nomenclature by the original proprietor. “A house called ‘Quien Sabe’——” said Alexis. “Is the house for us,” cried Olivia, aglow. They took it at once, without question. It wasn’t as if it were an uncertain sort of place, like “Normanhurst,” or “Sea View.” The name proclaimed frankly the certainty of venturesomeness. And Alexis Triona, sitting on the scrubby grass and sand, his back against the little veranda, the infinite sea and all the universe enveloped in still moonlight, laughed the laugh of deep happiness at their childish inspiration. He rolled, licked and lit the final cigarette. Tobacco was good. Better was this August night of velvet and diamonds. Below, the little stone groin shone like onyx. The lazy surf of ebb-tide far away on the sand of a tiny bay glimmered like the foam in fairyland.