“Isn’t it, David?” ...  With hushed voices and light steps, they passed up and through the sunny rooms.  Fresh flowers everywhere, and one bright room with two small white beds.

“The maiden-aunts,” Cairns said hoarsely.

At length, he held open for her to enter, the door of the great front room, filled with Northern brightness from a skylight of modern proportions.

“Why, David,” she whispered raptly, “it’s like a studio!  It is a studio!”

And then she saw the scaffoldings, the ladders and panels which do not belong to a painter.

She faced him....

The room was filled with adoration that enchanted the light.  The branches of the trees about the lower windows, softly harped the sound of the sea ...  Vina’s hands were pressed strangely to her breast, as she crossed to an open window....  And there she stood, face averted, and not moving her hands, until she felt him near.

* * * * *

“But I must tell you that the thought was not mine first of all, Vina,” Cairns was saying an hour afterward.  “You used to talk to me a great deal about Nantucket—­about the houses in Lily Lane, the little heads about the table, and how you walked by, watching hungrily like a night-bird—­peering in at simple happiness.  I couldn’t forget that, and I told Bedient—­how you loved Nantucket.  One night at the club, he said:  ’Buy one of those houses, David, and let her find out some summer morning slowly—­that it is hers—­and watch her face.’  Then he suggested that we both come over here to see about it.  That’s what took us away a month ago.”

There was a soft light about her face, not of the room.  Cairns saw it as she regarded him steadily for a moment.  “I love your telling me that, David,” she said.

“I could hardly hold the happiness of it so long,” he added.  “Last night it was hard, too....  So Bedient and I came over and met the maiden-aunts.  Such a rare time we had together—­and yet, deep within, he was suffering.”

“He went away almost immediately afterward, didn’t he?”

“Yes....  Vina, do you think he couldn’t make Beth forget the Other?”

“No, David.”

Her unqualified answer aroused him.  “I haven’t seen Beth for weeks,” he said.  “She has been out of town mostly.  I must see her now.”

“Yes?”

“Vina, what a crude boy, I was—­not to have known you—­all these years.  It seems as if I had to know Bedient first.”

“Perhaps, I did too, David.”

“And Vina, it was a word of Beth’s that started me thinking about you—­that made me realize you were in the world....  This moment I would give her my arms, my eyes—­for that word of hers.”

“She is the truest woman I have ever known,” Vina said.

...  “The Other is back in New York,” Cairns told her a moment later.  “I saw him an hour before leaving, but not to speak to....  How strange it would be——­”