“Damaris,” he said, “Damaris, what has happened?—­Stop though, you needn’t tell me.  I know.  We’ve found one another—­haven’t we?—­Found one another more in the silence than in the talking.—­Queer, things should work that way!  But it puts a seal on fact.  For they couldn’t so work unless the same stuff, the same inclination, were embedded right in the very innermost substance of both of us.  You look rested.  You look glad—­bless you.—­Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” she simply told him.

Faircloth set his elbows on his knees, his chin on his two hands, wrist against wrist, and his glance ranged out over the garden again, to the pale strip of the Bar spread between river and sea.

“Then I can go,” he said, “but not because I’ve tired you.”

“I shall never be tired any more from—­from being with you.”

“I don’t fancy you will.  All the same I must go, because my time’s up.  My train leaves Marychurch at six, and I have to call at the Inn, to bid my mother good-bye, on my way to the station.”

Was the perfect harmony, the perfect adjustment of spirit to spirit a wee bit jarred, did a mist come up over the heavenly bright sky, Faircloth asked himself?  And answered doggedly that, if it were so, he could not help it.  For since, by all ruling of loyalty and dignity, the wall of partition was ordained to stand, wasn’t it safer to remind both himself and Damaris, at times, of its presence?  He must keep his feet on the floor, good God—­keep them very squarely on the floor—­for otherwise, wasn’t it possible to conceive of their skirting the edge of unnamable abysses?  In furtherance of that so necessary soberness of outlook he now went on speaking.

“But before I go, I want to hark back to a matter of quite ancient history—­your lost shoes and stockings—­for thereby hangs a tale.”

And he proceeded to tell her how, about a week ago, being caught by a wild flurry of rain in an outlying part of the island, behind the black cottages and Inn, he took shelter in a disused ruinous boat-house opening on the great reed-beds which here rim the shore.  A melancholy, forsaken place, from which, at low tide, you can walk across the mud-flats to Lampit, with a pleasing chance of being sucked under by quicksands.  Abram Sclanders’ unhappy half-witted son haunted this boat-house, it seemed, storing his shrimping nets there, any other things as well, a venerable magpie’s hoard of scraps and lumber; using it as a run-hole, too, when the other lads hunted and tormented him according to their healthy, brutal youthful way.

—­A regular joss-house, he’d made of it.  And set up in one corner, white and ghostly—­making you stare a minute when you first came inside—­a ship’s figure-head, a three-foot odd Britannia, pudding-basin bosomed and eagle-featured, with castellated headgear, clasping a trident in her hand.  She, as presiding deity and—­