He had told her several things.  The color of Mary’s hair, for instance.  Her hair was yellow.  Benis had been insistent in pointing out that when he said “yellow” he did not mean goldish or bronze, or fawn-colored or tow-colored or Titian, but just yellow.  “Do you see that patch of sky over there where the mountain dips?” he had said.  “Mary’s hair was yellow, like that.”

That patch of sky, as Desire remembered it, was very beautiful.  Quite too beautiful to be compared to any-one’s hair.  No doubt it was only in Benis’s imagination that Mary’s hair was anything like it.

But nevertheless it was there that the world had gone wrong.  It was while Benis had sat gazing into that patch of amber sky that Desire, gazing too, had, for the first time, realized the Other.  Up until then, Mary had been an abstraction—­thenceforth she was a personality.  That made all the difference.  Desire, throwing shells at crabs, admitted that, for her, there had been no Mary until she had heard that her hair was yellow.

It was ridiculous but it was true.  Mary without hair had been a gentle and retiring shade.  A phantom in whom it had been possible to take an academic interest.  But no shade has a right to hair like an amber sunset.  Desire threw a shell viciously.  Very little more, she felt, and she would positively dislike Mary!

She jumped up and stamped in the shallow water.  The crabs, big and little, scuttled away.

“Hurr-ee!” called the professor waving a frying-pan.

“Com-ing!” Desire’s voice rose gaily.  For the present, her small dissatisfaction vanished with the crabs.

“This coffee has been made ten minutes,” grumbled the getter-of-breakfast with a properly martyred air.  “Whatever were you doing?”

“Thinking.”

“It isn’t done.  Not before breakfast.”

“I was thinking,” fibbed Desire, “that I have never been so spoiled in my life and that it can’t go on.  My domestic conscience is beginning to murmur.  As soon as we are at home, you will be expected to stay in bed until you smell the coffee coming up the stairs.”

“Aunt Caroline,” said the professor, “does not believe in coffee for breakfast, except on Sunday.”

“I do.”

“Eh?  Oh—­I see.  Well, I’ll put my money on you.  Only I hope you aren’t really set on making it yourself.  Because the cook would leave.’”

“Good gracious!  Do we have a cook?”

“We do.  At least, we did.  Also a maid.  But maids, I understand, are greatly diminished.  There appear to have been tragedies in Bainbridge.  Have you eaten sufficient bacon to listen calmly to an extract from Aunt Caroline’s last?  Sit tight, then—­