e hours' run to Fair Harbor in her car, driving it
herself, and as the familiar landfalls fell into place, she doubted if
it would not have been wiser had she stayed away. For she found that the
memories of more than twenty summers at Fair Harbor had been wiped out
by those of one summer, by those of one man. The natives greeted her
joyously: the boatmen, the fishermen, her own grooms and gardeners, the
village postmaster, the oldest inhabitant. They welcomed her as though
they were her vassals and she their queen. But it was the one man she
had exiled from Fair Harbor who at every turn wrung her heart and caused
her throat to tighten. She passed the cottage where he had lodged, and
hundreds of years seemed to have gone since she used to wait for him in
the street, blowing noisily on her automobile horn, calling derisively
to his open windows. Wherever she turned Fair Harbor spoke of him. The
golf-links; the bathing beach; the ugly corner in the main street where
he always reminded her that it was better to go slow for ten seconds
than to remain a long time dead; the old house on the stone wharf where
the schooners made fast, which he intended to borrow for his honeymoon;
the wooden trough where they always drew rein to water the ponies; the
pond into which he had waded to bring her lilies.

On the second day of her stay she found she was passing these places
purposely, that to do so she was going out of her way. They no longer
distressed her, but gave her a strange comfort. They were old friends,
who had known her in the days when she was rich in happiness.

But the secret hiding-place--their very own hiding-place, the opening
among the pines that overhung the jumble of rocks and the sea--she could
not bring herself to visit. And then, on the afternoon of the third day
when she was driving alone toward the lighthouse, her pony, of his own
accord, from force of habit, turned smartly into the wood road. And
again from force of habit, before he reached the spot that overlooked
the sea, he came to a full stop. There was no need to make him fast. For
hours, stretching over many summer days, he had stood under those same
branches patiently waiting.

On foot, her heart beating tremulously, stepping reverently, as one
enters the aisle of some dim cathedral, Helen advanced into the sacred
circle. And then she stood quite still. What she had expected to find
there she could not have told, but it was gone. The place was unknown