I'd make the Americans pay a tax, spoiling our country as they do." 

 "I am an American," said Harkness faintly. 

 The old man licked his thumb, looked at it, and licked it again. "I wouldn't have thought it," he said. "Where's your accent?" 

 "I have lived in this country a great many years off and on," he explained, "and we don't all say 'I guess' every moment as novelists make us do," he added, smiling. 

 Smiling, yes. But how deeply he detested this unfortunate conversation! How happy he had been, and now this old man with his rudeness and violence had smashed the peace into a thousand fragments. But the old man spoke little more. He only stared at Harkness out of his blue eyes, and said: 

 "Treliss is too beautiful a place for you. It will do you harm," and fell instantly asleep. 

II

 Yes, Harkness thought, looking at the rise and fall of the old man's beard, it is strange and indeed lamentable how deeply I detest a cross word! That is why I am always creeping away from things, why, too, I never make friends—not real friends—why at thirty-five I am a complete failure—that is, from the point of view of anything real. 

 I am filled too with self-pity, he added as he opened To Paradise again and groped for page four, and self-pity is the most despicable of all the vices. 

 He was not unpleasing to the eye as he sat there thinking. He was dressed with exceeding neatness, but his clothes had something of the effect of chain armour. Was that partly because his figure was so slight that he could never fill any suit of clothes adequately? That might be so. His soft white collar, his pale blue tie, his mild blue eyes, his long tranquil fingers, these things were all gentle. His chin protruded. He was called "gaunt" by undiscerning friends, but that was a poor word for him. He was too slight for that, too gentle, too unobtrusive. His hair was already retreating deprecatingly from his forehead. No gaunt man would smile so timidly. His neatness and immaculate spotless purity of dress showed a fastidiousness that granted his cowardice an excuse. 

 For I am a coward, he thought. This is yet another holiday that I am taking alone. Alone after all these years. And Pritchard or Mason, Major Stock or Henry Trenchard, Carstairs Willing or Falk Brandon—any one of these might have wished to go if 

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