stood facing the wide world, that lacked, for him at
all events, a Margaret Brandt, and was therefore void and desolate.

"If ever you seek perfect peace, relief from your fellows, and the
simple life, try Sark--and see that you live in a cottage!" he
remembered Adam Black murmuring softly, as they sat smoking at the
Travellers' one night, shortly after that memorable dinner of the
Whitefriars'. And then he had heaved a sigh of regret at thought of
being where he was when he might have been in Sark.

Graeme knew nothing whatever of Sark save what his friend had let fall
at times. "Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark," recalled his
short-jacket and broad-collar days, and the last of the quartette had
always somehow conjured up in his mind the image of a bleak,
inaccessible rock set in a stormy sea, where no one lived if he could
possibly find shelter elsewhere,--an Ultima Thule, difficult of access
and still more difficult of exit, a weather-bound little spot into
which you scrambled precariously by means of boats and ladders, and
out of which you might not be able to get for weeks on end.

But Sark was to hold a very different place in his mind henceforth.
The name of Calais burnt itself into the heart of Queen Mary by reason
of loss. Surely on John Graeme's heart the name of Sark may hope to
find itself in living letters, for in Sark he was to find more than he
had lost--new grace and charm in life, new hopes, new life itself.

He had gone straight home from Lincoln's Inn, and packed his
portmanteau, knowing only that he was going away somewhere out of
things, caring little where, so long as it was remote and lonely.

Fellow-man--and especially woman--was distasteful to him at the
moment. He craved only Solitude the Soother, and Nature the Healer.

He packed all he thought he might need for a couple of months' stay,
and among other things the manuscript he had been at work upon until
more pressing matters intervened. He felt, indeed, no slightest
inclination towards it, or anything else, at present. But that might
come, for Work and he were tried friends.

He wrote briefly to Lady Elspeth telling her how things were with him,
and that he was going away for a time. He did not tell her where, for
the simple reason that at the moment of writing he did not know
himself. Sark came into his mind later.

He told his landlady that he was going away for a change, and she
remarked in motherly fashion that she was glad