sat down by the fire, and I perceived that, perhaps because I was flushed and looked younger, he felt more intimate with me than he had yet done since his return. Indeed, in the warm, friendly silence that followed he was like a patient when tiring visitors have gone and he is left alone with his trusted nurse; smiled under drooped lids and then paid me the high compliment of disregard. His limbs relaxed, he sank back into his chair. I watched him vigilantly, and was ready at that moment when thought intruded into his drowsings and his face began to twitch. I asked:

"You can't remember her at all?"

"Oh, yes," he said, without raising his eyelids, "in a sense. I know how she bows when you meet her in the street, how she dresses when she goes to church. I know her as one knows a woman staying in the same hotel, just like that."

"It's a pity you can't remember Kitty. All that a wife should be she's been to you."

He sat forward, warming his palms at the blaze and hunching his shoulders as though there were a draft. His silence compelled me to look at him, and I found his eyes, cold and incredulous and frightened, on me.

"Jenny, is this true?"

"That Kitty's been a good wife?"

"That Kitty is my wife, that I am old, that"—he waved a hand at the altered room—"all this."

"It is all true. She is your wife, and this place is changed, and it's better and jollier in all sorts of ways, believe me, and fifteen years have passed. Why, Chris, can't you see that I have grown old?" My vanity could hardly endure his slow stare, but I kept my fingers clasped on my lap. "You see?"

He turned away with an assenting mutter; but I saw that deep down in him, not to be moved by any material proof, his spirit was incredulous.

"Tell me what seems real to you," I begged. "Chris, be a pal. I'll never tell."

"M-m-m," he said. His elbows were on his knees, and his hands stroked his thick tarnished hair. I could not see his face, but I knew that his skin was red and that his gray eyes were wet and bright. Then suddenly he lifted his chin and laughed, like a happy swimmer breaking through a wave that has swept him far inshore. He glowed with a radiance that illuminated the moment till my blood tingled and I began to rub my hands together and laugh, too. "Why, Monkey Island's real. But you don't know old Monkey. Let me tell you."

CHAPTER III

CHRIS told the story lingeringly, in loving detail. From Uncle Ambrose's gates, it seems, one took the path across the meadow where Whiston's cows are put to graze, passed through the second stile—the one between the two big alders—into a long straight road that ran across the flat lands to Bray. After a mile or so there branched from it a private road that followed a line of noble poplars down to the ferry. Between two of them—he described it meticulously, as though it were of immense significance—there stood a white hawthorn. In front were the dark-green, glassy waters of an unvisited back-water, and beyond them a bright lawn set with many walnut-trees and a few great chestnuts, well lighted with their candles, and to the left of that a low, white house with a green dome rising in its middle, and a veranda with a roof of hammered iron that had gone verdigris-color with age and the Thames weather. This was the Monkey Island Inn. The third Duke of Marlborough had built it for a "folly," and perching there with nothing but a line of walnut-trees and a fringe of lawn between it and the fast, full, shining Thames, it had an eighteenth-century grace and silliness.

Well, one sounded the bell that hung on a post, and presently Margaret in a white dress would come out of the porch and would walk to the stone steps down to the river. Invariably, as she passed the walnut-tree that overhung the path, she would pick a leaf, crush it, and sniff the sweet scent; and as she came near the steps she would shade her eyes and peer across the water. "She is a little near-sighted; you can't imagine how sweet it makes her look," Chris explained. (I did not say that I had seen her, for, indeed, this Margaret I had never seen.) A sudden serene gravity would show that she had seen one, and she would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly, with rather stiff movements of her long arms, to exactly the right place. When she had got the punt up on the gravel her serious brow would relax, and she would smile at one and shake hands and say something friendly, like, "Father thought you'd be over this afternoon, it being so fine; so he's saved some duck's eggs for tea."

And then one took the pole from her and brought her back to the island, though probably one did not mount the steps to the lawn for a long time. It was so good to sit in the punt by the landing-stage while Margaret dabbled her hands in the black waters and forgot her shyness as one talked. "She's such good company. She's got an accurate mind that would have made her a good engineer, but when she picks up facts she kind of gives them a motherly hug. She's charity and love itself." (Again I did not say that I had seen her.) If people drifted in to tea, one had to talk to her while she cut the bread and butter and the sandwiches in the kitchen, but in this year of floods few visitors cared to try the hard rowing below Bray Lock.

She would get into the four-foot punt that was used as a ferry and bring it over very slowly

So usually one sat down there in the boat, talking with a sense of leisure, as though one had all the rest of one's life in which to carry on this conversation, and noting how the reflected ripple of the water made a bright, vibrant, mark upon her throat, and other effects of the scene upon her beauty, until the afternoon grew drowsy, and she said, "Father will be wanting his tea." And they would go up and find old Allington, in white ducks, standing in the fringe of long grasses and cow-parsley on the other edge of the island, looking to his poultry or his rabbits. He was a little man, with a tuft of copper-colored hair rising from the middle of his forehead like a clown's curl, who shook hands hard and explained very soon that he was a rough diamond.

Then they all had tea under the walnut-tree where the canary's cage was hanging, and the ducks' eggs would be brought out, and Mr. Allington would talk much Thames-side gossip: how the lock-keeper at Teddington had had his back broken by a swan, mad as swans are in May; how they would lose their license at the Dovetail Arms if they were not careful; and how the man who kept the inn by Surly Hall was like to die, because after he had been cursing his daughter for two days for having run away with a soldier from Windsor Barracks, he had suddenly seen her white face in a clump of rushes in the river just under the hole in the garden fence. Margaret would sit quiet, round-eyed at the world's ways, and shy because of Chris.

So they would sit on that bright lawn until the day was dyed with evening blue, and Mr. Allington was more and more often obliged to leap into the punt to chase his ducks, which had started on a trip to Bray Lock, or to crawl into the undergrowth after rabbits similarly demoralized by the dusk.

Then Chris would say he had to go, and they would stand in a communing silence while the hearty voice of Mr. Allington shouted from midstream or under the alder-boughs a disregarded invitation to stay and have a bite of supper. In the liquefaction