to mock him
with their brightness.

In the first shock of his downcasting, wounded pride said, "I will
show no sign. I will forget her. I will salve the bruise with work.
Margaret Brandt is not the only woman in the world. In time some other
shall take her place;"--and he tried his hardest to believe it.

But body is one thing and mind another. The body you may compel to any
mortal thing, but the mind is of a different order, and strongest will
cannot whip it to heel at times. Forbid it thought of thing or person
and the forbidden is just that which will persist in obtruding itself
to the exclusion of all else.

And so, in spite of him, the dull ache in his heart at every thought
of Margaret murmured without ceasing, "There is none like her--none!"
And crush and compel it as he might, the truth would out, and out the
more the more he tried to crush it.

And so at times, in spite of his surroundings, his spirits dragged in
lowest deeps.

Work he could not as yet, for the work of the writer demands absolute
concentration and most complete surrender, and all his faculties were
centred, in spite of himself, on Margaret Brandt and his own great
loss in her.

He rambled all over the island with his dog friends, risked skin and
bones in precarious descents into apparently impossible depths,
scrambled laboriously among the ragged bastions of the Coupee and
Little Sark, explored endless caverns, loitered by day in bosky lanes,
and roamed restlessly by night under the brightest stars he had ever
seen.

But, wherever he went--down underground in the Boutiques or the
Gouliots; or lying on the Eperquerie among the flaming gorse and
cloudlike stretches of primroses; or standing on Longue Pointe while
the sun sank in unearthly splendours behind Herm and Guernsey; or
watching from the windmill the throbbing life-lights all round the
wide horizon;--wherever he was, and whatever he was doing, there with
him always was the poignant remembrance of Margaret Brandt and his
loss in her.

His heart ached so, at thought of the emptiness and desolation of the
years that lay before him, that at times his body ached also, and the
spirit within him groaned in sympathy.

Life without Margaret! What was it worth?

Though it brought him riches and honours overpassing his hopes--and he
doubted now at times if that were possible, lacking the inspiration of
Margaret--what was it worth?

Riches and honours, won at the true sword's point of