cquaintances; and presently stepping, with a quiver of fear
akin to delight, into the restless, limitless blue water that stretched
southward under a milky haze: luncheon somewhere, more new acquaintances,
and then, perhaps, in Lily's light wood victoria to meet the train of
trains. For at half-past five the little station, forlorn all day long in
the midst of the twisted cedars that grew out of the heated sand, assumed
an air of gayety and animation. Vehicles of all sorts drew up in the open
space before it, wagonettes, phaetons, victorias, high wheeled hackney
carts, and low Hempstead carts: women in white summer gowns and veils
compared notes, or shouted invitations to dinner from carriage to
carriage. The engine rolled in with a great cloud of dust, the horses
danced, the husbands and the overnight guests, grimy and brandishing
evening newspapers, poured out of the special car where they had sat in
arm-chairs and talked stocks all the way from Long Island City. Some were
driven home, it is true; some to the beach, and others to the Quicksands
Club, where they continued their discussions over whiskey-and-sodas
until it was time to have a cocktail and dress for dinner.

Then came the memorable evening when Lily Dallam gave a dinner in honour
of Honora, her real introduction to Quicksands. It was characteristic of
Lily that her touch made the desert bloom. Three years before Quicksands
had gasped to hear that the Sidney Dallams had bought the Faraday house
--or rather what remained of it.

"We got it for nothing," Lily explained triumphantly on the occasion of
Honora's first admiring view. "Nobody would look at it, my dear."

It must have been this first price, undoubtedly, that appealed to Sidney
Dallam, model for all husbands: to Sidney, who had had as much of an idea
of buying in Quicksands as of acquiring a Scotch shooting box. The
"Faraday place" had belonged to the middle ages, as time is reckoned in
Quicksands, and had lain deserted for years, chiefly on account of its
lugubrious and funereal aspect. It was on a corner. Two "for rent" signs
had fallen successively from the overgrown hedge: some fifty feet back
from the road, hidden by undergrowth and in the tenebrous shades of huge
larches and cedars, stood a hideous, two-storied house with a mansard
roof, once painted dark red.

The magical transformation of all this into a sunny, smiling, white villa
with red-striped awnings and well-kept lawns and just enou