The very fact that he knew himself to be not at all well made him hate to be told so. An irritable line ran across his forehead. "Oh, yes, I'm well," he said, "never better. Come along to the summer house and let's put a dune between us and those vultures." He led her down a flight of stone steps and over a stretch of undulating dry sand to the place where Hosack invariably read the morning paper and to which his servants led their village beaux when the moon was up, there to give far too faithful imitations of the hyena. And there he sat her down and stood in front of her, enigmatically, wondering how much she knew. "If it comes to that," he said, "you look far from well yourself, Alice." And she turned her pretty, prim face up to him with a sudden trembling of the lips. "What do you expect," she asked, quite simply, "when I've only had one short letter from you all the time I've been away." "I never write letters," he said. "You know that. How's your mother?" "But I wrote every day, and if you read them you'd know." He shifted one shoulder. These gentle creatures could be horribly disconcerting and direct. As a matter of fact he had failed to open more than two of the collection. They were too full of the vibration of a love that had never stirred him. "Yes, I'm glad she's better. I'm afraid you've been rather bored. Illness is always boring." "I can only have one mother," said Alice. Palgrave felt the need of a cigarette. Alice, admirable as she was, had a fatal habit, he thought, of uttering bromides. And she instantly regretted the remark. She knew that way of his of snapping his cigarette case. Was that heavily be-flowered church a dream and that great house in New York only part of a mirage? He seemed to be the husband of some other girl, barely able to tolerate this interruption. She had come determined to get the truth, however terrible it might be. But it was very difficult, and he was obviously not going to help her, and now that she saw him again, curiously worn and nervous and petulant, she dreaded to ask for facts under which her love was to be laid in waste. "No wonder you like this place," she said, beating about the bush. "I don't. I loathe it. The everlasting drumming of the sea puts me on edge. It's as bad as living within sound of the elevated railway. And at night the frogs on the land side of the house add to the racket and make a row like a factory in full blast. I'd rather be condemned to a hospital for incurables than live on a dune." He said all this with the sort of hysteria that she had never noticed in him before. He was indeed far from well. Hardly, in fact, recognizable. The suave, imperturbable Gilbert, with the quiet air of patronage and the cool irony of the polished man of the world,--what had become of him? Was it possible that Joan had resisted him? She couldn't believe such a thing. "Then why have you stayed so long?" she asked, with this new point of view stirring hope.