The mansion was quiet. The other house-guests were motoring or darting about the twilit tennis-court or trading in the gossip-exchange at the Casino. Jim and Charity were marooned in a sleeping castle. At length Jim broke forth, “For God's sake, sing.” Charity laughed a little and said, “All right--anything to make you talk.” She went to the piano and shifted the music. There were dozens of songs about roses. She dropped to the bench and began to play and croon Edward Carpenter's luscious music to Waller's old poem, “Go, Lovely Rose.” Jim began to talk almost at once. Charity went on singing, smiling a little at the familiar experience of being asked to sing only to be talked over. Jim grew garrulous as he read across her shoulder with characteristic impoliteness. _“Tell her that wastes her time and me,”_ he quoted; then he groaned: “That's you and me, Charity Coe. But you're wasting yourself most of all.” He bent closer to peek at the name of the author. “Who's this feller Waller, who knows so much?” “Hush and listen,” she said, and hummed the song through. It made a new and deep impression on her in that humor. She felt that she had wasted the rosiness of her own life. Girlhood was gone; youth was gone; carefreedom was gone. Like petals they had fallen from the core of her soul. The words of the lyric stabbed her: Then die that she The common fate of all things rare May read in thee. How small a part of time they share That are so sweet and fair. Her fingers slipped from the keys and, as it were, died in her lap. Jim Dyckman understood a woman for once, and in a gush of pity for her and of resentment for her disprized preciousness caught at her to embrace her. Her hands came to life. The wifely instinct leaped to the fore. She struck and wrenched and drove him off. She was panting with wrath. “What a rotten thing to do! Go away and don't come near me again. I'm ashamed of you.” “Me, too,” he snarled. CHAPTER V Jim slunk out and slunk down the marble steps and down the winding walk and through the monstrous gate into the highway along the sea, enraged at himself and at Charity and at Peter Cheever. If he had met Cheever he would have picked him up and flung him over the sea-wall. But there was little danger of Peter Cheever's being found so near his wife. _“Tell her that wastes her time and me,”_ kept running through Jim's head. He was furious at Charity for wasting so much of him. He had followed her about and moped at her closed door like a stray dog. And she had never even thrown him a bone. A wave ran up on the beach and seemed to try to embrace the earth, possess it. But it fell away baffled. Over its subsiding pother sprang a new wave with the same bosomful of desire and the same frantic clutching here and there--the same rebuff, the same destruction under the surge of the next and the next. The descending night gave a strange pathos to the eternal vanity.