tatively, and as sounding novel
depths--in a way that occasioned one of them, at all events, very
great surprise. Indeed, it seemed to him afterwards that, for a silent
and observant man, he had been led into quite unwonted, but none the
less very enjoyable, ways. He went home that night feeling very much
as Columbus must have done when his New World swam before his eyes in
misted glory. He too had sighted a new world. He had discovered
Margaret Brandt.

She had travelled widely over Europe, he learned, and was looking
forward with eagerness to another tour in the near future. They
discovered a common liking for many of the places she had visited.

She was a wide and intelligent reader. To him it was a rare pleasure
to meet one.

"New places, and new books, and new people are always a joy to me,"
she said, in a glow of naive enthusiasm. And then she blushed slightly
lest he should discover a personal application in the last-named, or
even in the last two.

But Graeme was thinking of her, and was formulating her character from
the delicious little bits of self-revelation which slipped out every
now and again.

"Yes," he said, "new things are very enjoyable, and in these times
there is no lack of them. The tendency, I should say, is towards
superfluity. But new places----! There are surely not many left except
the North Pole and the South. Everybody goes everywhere nowadays, and
you tumble over friends in Damascus and find your tailor picnicking on
the slopes of Lebanon."

Now, as it chanced,--if you admit such a thing as chance in so tangled
a coil as this complex world of ours,--Adam Black had just tucked
Charles Pixley into a close little argumentative corner, and given him
food for contemplation, and catching Graeme's last remark, he smiled
across the table, and in a word of four letters dropped a seed into
several lives which bore odd fruit and blossom.

"Ever been to Sark, Graeme?" he asked.

"Sark? No. Let me see----"

"Channel Islands. You go across from Guernsey. If ever you want relief
from your fellows--to finish a book, or to start one, or just to
grizzle and find yourself--try Sark. It's the most wonderful little
place, and it's amazing how few people know it."

Then Charles Pixley bethought him of a fresh line of argument, and
engaged Black, and was promptly shown the error of his ways; and
Margaret Brandt and Graeme resumed their discussion of places and
books and people. And before that eveni