There seemed so little difference between a handful of leaflets scattered over the sea and a handful of grasses seeded on that circular coping, as long as the eternal Oblivion of the Blue brooded overhead. Late that night, in the garden of Ker Annic, there kissed me a young woman who had never kissed me before. She kissed me, and then with a sob fled past the dark auracaria into the house. The young woman was Jennie Aird. The next morning she had gone. PART IV THE DESERT ISLAND I The Island is deserted only in that none but they come there; for them, just those two, it blossoms as the rose. Its story is the oldest story of all, and the newest. It is told an infinitude of times, and yet, like that first story of the cycle of a thousand, we do not remember to have heard it before. Let us listen to it just once again. No coral-reef breaks its ceaselessly-thundering rollers into surf, no palms wave their dark fronds in the blue. Only a holiday-coast, with the London and South Western Company's steamers passing daily, and the known and familiar trees of oak and ilex and lime. No garments of skins and necklaces of shells, but a white summer frock, a grey raincoat over it, and a bundle that can be carried in the hand. No shelter of stones and branches that he who is with her toils to make with his own hands, but French slates, French tiles, French thatching, whichever it may be. And no wreck. Only the wreck of a home. Yet it is a Desert Island none the less; a Desert Island with pleasure-steamers running, and cars full of tourists coming and going, and the Rate of Exchange quoted daily, and the sound of a familiar and friendly tongue everywhere. A Desert Island with guide-books and time-tables, chars-à-bancs, the vedettes up the Rance, the excursions to Mont St Michel. A Desert Island with cameras and picture-postcards and greetings at every corner: "I didn't know you were over here! The So-and-Sos have just gone to Quimper. We're off to Concarneau on Tuesday. Where are you staying, and did you ever know anything like the price of golf-balls over here?" All over Haute Bretagne the same, all over Northern France the same; and somewhere among it all a Desert Island _à deux_. Probably a moving one, on four bicycle-wheels. But where look for it? In Dol? Lamballe? Rennes? In what arrondissement, canton, commune? There are many bicycles in France, but there is only one Island precisely like that one. For there is only one man who has been forty-five years of age and is now eighteen, only one woman who, embracing him, has made her fate commensurate with his own. They are apart, unapproachable, unidentified, not to be communicated with though you look into their faces and speak to them. Their nonentity is lost in the multitudinousness of everything else. They keep no signal-fires burning day and night for your ship or mine that passes. They are marooned in their own bliss, angelic castaways who will not return to us.