I realised in an instant what I had done. Fool that I had been. The bow-window! 

 I was rigid with discomfiture. My mother’s eyes were on the book she held. And yet a faint smile seemed to hover round her lips. I walked in silence to where she sat at the open window. 

 She looked up. Her smile was more pronounced. 

 “Margie,” she said. 

 “Yes, mother?” 

 “The hedonism of Voltaire is the indictment of an honest bore.” 

 “Yes, mother.” 

 She then resumed her book. 

 

 CHAPTER 2 JAMES SETS OUT

 (Miss Margaret Goodwin’s narrative continued) 

 Those August days! Have there been any like them before? I realise with difficulty that the future holds in store for me others as golden. 

 The island was crammed with trippers. They streamed in by every boat. But James and I were infinitely alone. I loved him from the first, from the moment when he had rowed out of the unknown into my life, clad in a dressing-gown. I like to think that he loved me from that moment, too. But, if he did, the knowledge that he did came to him only after a certain delay. It was my privilege to watch this knowledge steal gradually but surely upon him. 

 We were always together; and as the days passed by he spoke freely of himself and his affairs, obeying unconsciously the rudder of my tactful inquisitiveness. By the end of the first week I knew as much about him as he did himself. 

 It seemed that a guardian—an impersonal sort of business man with a small but impossible family—was the most commanding figure in his private life. As for his finances, five-and-forty sovereigns, the remnant of a larger sum which had paid for his education at Cambridge, stood between him and the necessity of offering for hire a 

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