第93章

It was a bungalow, put up on a space cleared among a wood of young trees that was carpeted with ferns.It might have been built for a poet or a novelist or just an ordinary muscular man who loved the water and the silences and the sense of being on the edge of the world.It was a bungalow of logs, roughly constructed and saved from utter banality by being almost completely clothed in wisteria.It was admirably suited to two men who found amusement in being primitive or to a romantic honeymoon couple who wanted to fancy themselves on a desert island.Better still, it might have been built for just that night, for Palgrave and the girl who had taken shape in his one good dream.

Joan got out of the opulent car and watched Gilbert run it round to the side of the house.There was no garage and not even a shed to give it cover.Gilbert left it in the open, where it remained sulky and supercilious, like a grand piano in an empty kitchen.

Joan had noticed this place twice that day--on the way out to find Martin, and again on the way back from having heard the voice of the girl with the white face and the red lips and the hair that came out of a bottle.Martin--Martin--and it was all her fault.

She wondered for a moment why no one came to open the door.Some one was there because smoke was coming out of a chimney.But she refused to be impatient.She had decided to give Gilbert one evening--to be nice to him for one evening.He was terribly humble.Fate had dealt her a smashing blow on the heart, and she had returned to consciousness wistfully eager to make up at least to this man as well as she could for the pain that she had caused.There was only this one evening in which to do so because to-morrow she was going back to the old house, the old people, the old servants and the old days, a failure, having fallen off the Round-about, of which she had spoken so much.She was going back a sort of cripple to the place from which she had escaped to put the key into life; once more to read to her grandfather, to obey the orders of her grandmother, to sleep in the warm kind arms of her old bedroom, to go among the flowers and trees among which she had grown up, herself old and tired and ashamed and broken-hearted, with her gold ring burning into her finger and the constant vision of Martin's shining armor lying bent and rusty before her eyes.What an end to her great adventure!

Gilbert came up.He walked without his usual affectation of never permitting anything to hurry him.All about him there was still a sort of exaltation.His eyes were amazingly bright.His face had lost its cynicism.Ten years seemed to have fallen from his shoulders like a pack.He was a youth again, like Martin and Harry and Howard.Joan noticed all this and was vaguely surprised--and glad, because obviously she was giving him pleasure.He deserved it after her impish treatment of him.What a fool she had been.

He said, bending down, "We keep the key here," and picked it up, unlocked the door and stood back for her to pass.

"Oh, isn't this nice!" said Joan.

"Do you like it? It amused me to make it comfortable.""Comfortable! But it's like a picture."