If the world had been searched, perhaps, no greater contrast to Rivington could have been found than this delightful colony of quicksands, full of life and motion and colour, where everybody was beautifully dressed and enjoying themselves.  For a whole week after her instalment Honora was in a continual state of excitement and anticipation, and the sound of wheels and voices on the highroad beyond the hedge sent her peeping to her curtains a dozen times a day.  The waking hours, instead of burdens, were so many fleeting joys.  In the morning she awoke to breathe a new, perplexing, and delicious perfume—­the salt sea breeze stirring her curtains:  later, she was on the gay, yellow-ochre beach with Lily Dallam, making new acquaintances; and presently stepping, with a quiver of fear akin to delight, into the restless, limitless blue water that stretched southward under a milky haze:  luncheon somewhere, more new acquaintances, and then, perhaps, in Lily’s light wood victoria to meet the train of trains.  For at half-past five the little station, forlorn all day long in the midst of the twisted cedars that grew out of the heated sand, assumed an air of gayety and animation.  Vehicles of all sorts drew up in the open space before it, wagonettes, phaetons, victorias, high wheeled hackney carts, and low Hempstead carts:  women in white summer gowns and veils compared notes, or shouted invitations to dinner from carriage to carriage.  The engine rolled in with a great cloud of dust, the horses danced, the husbands and the overnight guests, grimy and brandishing evening newspapers, poured out of the special car where they had sat in arm-chairs and talked stocks all the way from Long Island City.  Some were driven home, it is true; some to the beach, and others to the Quicksands Club, where they continued their discussions over whiskey-and-sodas until it was time to have a cocktail and dress for dinner.

Then came the memorable evening when Lily Dallam gave a dinner in honour of Honora, her real introduction to Quicksands.  It was characteristic of Lily that her touch made the desert bloom.  Three years before Quicksands had gasped to hear that the Sidney Dallams had bought the Faraday house —­or rather what remained of it.

“We got it for nothing,” Lily explained triumphantly on the occasion of Honora’s first admiring view.  “Nobody would look at it, my dear.”

It must have been this first price, undoubtedly, that appealed to Sidney Dallam, model for all husbands:  to Sidney, who had had as much of an idea of buying in Quicksands as of acquiring a Scotch shooting box.  The “Faraday place” had belonged to the middle ages, as time is reckoned in Quicksands, and had lain deserted for years, chiefly on account of its lugubrious and funereal aspect.  It was on a corner.  Two “for rent” signs had fallen successively from the overgrown hedge:  some fifty feet back from the road, hidden by undergrowth and in the tenebrous shades of huge larches and cedars, stood a hideous, two-storied house with a mansard roof, once painted dark red.