to the beach on which the sentimental lovers were separated. His French ancestor, though dispossessed, had returned—for what? To be disillusioned, as usual. He sat musing until it was dark, then made his way stumblingly toward the abandoned wharf.
Near the overhanging bluff, after a sharp ascent, he came opposite the cottage of Phœbe Meddar. He walked around it from a safe distance, as he had done eighteen years before, when his inamorata lay mortally ill of an overindulgence in cucumbers and milk.
Some one was coming out of the cottage, and he turned away, striking out across the fields towards the village.
In his cheerless lodging he was unable to compose himself for sleep. After a vain attempt to read, he rose and paced the room. Finally he sat down, with some vague notion of writing to Pat Coyle. Loneliness pressed him with hard knuckles. He longed to pour himself out, and there was no human being in whom he could entirely confide. He acknowledged now—now that he had come a journey of many thousand miles—that he was basing high hopes on Phœbe Meddar. He acknowledged it, and in the same breath upbraided himself for his folly. It was an expedition as hare-brained as a search for buried treasure.
He longed to see Phœbe, yet feared the encounter. For a moment he had a wild plan of rehearsing her in the romantic attitude he expected of her—if he could only have done it anonymously! He wanted to write, "Do, please, be imaginative enough to rise to the occasion. Do understand that Paul Minas is a quixotic creature with a highly intellectualized sentimentalism, that he has chosen you—you on the strength of old, tenuous associations—as the embodiment of a hundred indeterminate desires. So, don't for goodness' sake be commonplace—or at least, don't let your inevitable human
