ton was in a bad way, but
certain things still struck him as funny, and the money which he had
been enabled to borrow from the bank had eased his mind. Still, so
Lucy told me, he could not sleep at night, and it must have been
obvious to the most casual observer that he was a sick man. He had a
drawn and hungry look. Jock and Hurry could by no means satisfy his
appetite for affection. Indeed, I think the sight and touch and the
sounds of them at play were no great comfort to him at this time. He
must have felt in their presence something of that anguish of pity
which a man feels for children who have lost their mother.

He had hoped at first that Lucy's failure of affection was but a
temporary aberration. But at last he must have come to despair of any
change in her feelings for him, at least under existing conditions.
Indeed their relations were going from bad to worse. A man loved and
beloved falls into habits of passion for which there is no cure but
death or old age. Yet a man would readily believe that separation
might affect him like an opiate, and it must have been in this belief
that Fulton determined to accompany Harry Colemain on a trip to Palm
Beach. To me he vouchsafed the explanation that he was not well and
that he couldn't sleep, and that when he wasn't well, and that when he
couldn't sleep, his one thought and desire was to get to salt water.
"It always cures me," he said, just as if he had often been sick
before. From Lucy I had the truth of the matter.

"He thinks," she said, "that if he goes away and stays away for a long
time that perhaps I will miss him enough to want him back, and on the
old footing. He isn't even going to write to me. It's going to be
exactly as if he didn't exist."

"Do you think it wise for him to go, Lucy?"

"Perhaps it will do him good. It won't change me. I know that. If
only he'd change. Haven't I done him enough harm to make him hate me?
Archie, I'm so sorry for him that I wish I was dead. And yet I want to
live. I'm too young to die. I want to live, and be happy--happy the
way I used to be happy."

"And you can't with John?"

She shook her head quietly. "It's the most wonderful thing to be in
love!" she said. "I wonder what I did to have that wonderful thing? I
wonder what I've done to deserve to lose it? And even if--even if it
happened again it could never be the same. There can be only one first
time--even if you've got a silly memory that