I shook my head with the helpless feeling of trying to explain some abstruse knowledge to a child. I had spoken of the colossal spaces, the solemn immensities of the place where I had set my human foot. I had tried to paint the desolate bleakness of that Borderland where the unnamed Thing and I met, each beyond his own law-decreed boundary, and locked in combat bitter and strong. Phillida had listened; and talked of ghosts the bugbears of grave-yard superstition. Did Vere comprehend me better? Did he visualize the struggle, weirdly akin to legends of knight and dragon, as prize of which waited Desire Michell; forlornly helpless as white Andromeda chained to her black cliff? Could the Maine countryman, the cabaret entertainer, seize the truths glimpsed by Rosicrucians and mystics of lost cults, when the highly bred college girl failed? It seemed so. At least his dark eyes met mine with intelligence; hers held only bewilderment and fear. "They are not ghosts," I said only. "But how can you be sure?" she persisted. Beneath the braid and the pomander lay the sheet of paper on which Desire had written weeks before; the first page of that composition now pouring gold into my hands. This I passed to Phillida. "Do ghosts write?" I queried. She read the lines aloud. "'We walk upon the shadows of hills, across a level thrown, and pant like climbers.'" "They do write, people say, with ouija boards and mediums," she murmured. I looked at Vere with despair of sustaining this argument. He stood up as if my appeal had been spoken, drawing her with him. "Now that it's a decent hour, don't you think Cristina might give us some breakfast?" he suggested. "I guess bacon and eggs would be sort of restoring. If you feel up to taking my arm as far as the porch, Mr. Locke, the fresh air might be good medicine, too." I have speculated sometimes upon how civilized man would get through days not spaced by his recurrent meals into three divisions. Those meals are hyphens between his mind and his body, as it were. What sense of humor can view too intensely a creature who must feed himself three times a day? Are we not pleasantly urged out of our heroics and into the normal by breakfast, luncheon and dinner? Deny it as we will, when we do not heed them we are out of touch with nature. We went downstairs. After breakfast was over, Vere and I walked across the orchard to a seat placed near the lake. There I sat down, while he remained standing in his favorite attitude: one foot on a low boulder, his arm resting on his knee as he gazed into the shallow, amber-tinted water. Fog still overlay the countryside, but without bringing coolness. The damp heat was stifling, almost tropical as the sun mounted higher in the hidden sky. I watched my companion, waiting for him to speak. He appeared intent upon the darting movements of a group of tiny fish, but I knew his thoughts were afar.