They sat quietly, side by side, without speaking.  Philip enjoyed having her near him.  He was warmed by her radiant health.  A glow of life seemed like an aureole to shine about her.

“Well, how have you been?” he said at last, with a little smile.

“Oh, it’s all right.  It was a false alarm.”

“Was it?”

“Aren’t you glad?”

An extraordinary sensation filled him.  He had felt certain that Sally’s suspicion was well-founded; it had never occurred to him for an instant that there was a possibility of error.  All his plans were suddenly overthrown, and the existence, so elaborately pictured, was no more than a dream which would never be realised.  He was free once more.  Free!  He need give up none of his projects, and life still was in his hands for him to do what he liked with.  He felt no exhilaration, but only dismay.  His heart sank.  The future stretched out before him in desolate emptiness.  It was as though he had sailed for many years over a great waste of waters, with peril and privation, and at last had come upon a fair haven, but as he was about to enter, some contrary wind had arisen and drove him out again into the open sea; and because he had let his mind dwell on these soft meads and pleasant woods of the land, the vast deserts of the ocean filled him with anguish.  He could not confront again the loneliness and the tempest.  Sally looked at him with her clear eyes.

“Aren’t you glad?” she asked again.  “I thought you’d be as pleased as Punch.”

He met her gaze haggardly.  “I’m not sure,” he muttered.

“You are funny.  Most men would.”

He realised that he had deceived himself; it was no self-sacrifice that had driven him to think of marrying, but the desire for a wife and a home and love; and now that it all seemed to slip through his fingers he was seized with despair.  He wanted all that more than anything in the world.  What did he care for Spain and its cities, Cordova, Toledo, Leon; what to him were the pagodas of Burmah and the lagoons of South Sea Islands?  America was here and now.  It seemed to him that all his life he had followed the ideals that other people, by their words or their writings, had instilled into him, and never the desires of his own heart.  Always his course had been swayed by what he thought he should do and never by what he wanted with his whole soul to do.  He put all that aside now with a gesture of impatience.  He had lived always in the future, and the present always, always had slipped through his fingers.  His ideals?  He thought of his desire to make a design, intricate and beautiful, out of the myriad, meaningless facts of life:  had he not seen also that the simplest pattern, that in which a man was born, worked, married, had children, and died, was likewise the most perfect?  It might be that to surrender to happiness was to accept defeat, but it was a defeat better than many victories.