epresented for Mr. Spokesly his entire visible and comprehensible
future. This was another key to his mood. It was as though he had
suddenly cashed in on all his available resources of happiness,
hypothecating them for the immediate and attainable yet romantic
present. By some fluke of fortune he could see that he actually held
within his grasp all that men toil and struggle for in this world, all
that they desire in youth, all that they remember in age. But he had no
certainty of the permanence of all this, and he lived in a kind of
anxious ecstasy, watching Evanthia each day with eager hungry eyes,
waiting with a sort of incredulous astonishment for the first shadow to
cross the dark mirror of their lives.

As it must, he told himself. This could not last for ever. And sometimes
he found himself trying to imagine how it would end. To-night he was
preoccupied with the discovery that each day, as the end approached, he
was dreading it more and more. He had tried to explain this to her as
they walked in the garden under the cypresses and looked across the dark
waters of the Gulf, and she had smiled and said: "Ah, yes!" She was
still a mystery to him, and that was another grief, since he did not yet
suspect that the mystery of a woman is simply a screen with nothing
behind it. She smiled in her alluring inscrutable way and he held her
desperately to him, wondering in what form the fate of their separation
would appear.

And when he saw that she had not come down to the jetty to meet him, as
she had done on previous nights, he instantly accepted her absence as a
signal of change. Yet at the back of his mind there burned a thin bright
flame of intelligence that told him the truth. Evanthia had that supreme
virtue of the courageous--her dissimulation was neither clumsy nor
cruel. It was as much a part of her as was her skin, her hair, her amber
eyes. He knew in his heart this was so and made of it a rack on which he
tortured himself with thoughts of her fidelity. Each day the difference
between this experience and the shallow clap-trap intrigues he had known
became more marked to him. The thought of her out there, hidden away
from other men, with her delicious graces of body and lucidity of mind,
for him alone, was almost too poignant for him. As he came alongside the
little staging, and made fast, he returned again to the foreboding
thought of the day. There would come an end. And beyond the end of this
he could see nothin