ear old Abbey which had been the home of the
Courtenayes for hundreds and hundreds of years, and travel when we
liked. Because we were so much in love and so happy, I yearned to make a
few thousand other people happy also--though it did seem impossible that
any one on earth could be as joyous as we were.

This was our second day out from New York on the _Aquitania_, and my
spirits had been slightly damped by discovering that two
fellow-passengers if not more were extremely miserable. One of these
lived in a stateroom next to our suite. In my cabin at night I could
hear her crying and moaning to herself in a fitful sleep. I had not seen
her, so far as I knew, but I fancied from the sound of those sobs that
she was young.

When I told Jim, he wanted to change cabins with me, so that I should
not be disturbed. But I refused to budge, saying that I _wasn't_
disturbed. My neighbour didn't cry or talk in her sleep all through the
night by any means. Besides, once I had dropped off, the sounds were not
loud enough to wake me. This was true enough not to be a fib, but my
_realest_ reason for clinging to the room was an odd fascination in that
mysterious sorrow on the other side of the wall; sorrow of a woman I
hadn't seen, might perhaps never see, yet to whom I could send out warm
waves of sympathy. I felt as if those waves had colours, blue and gold,
and that they would soothe the sufferer.

Her case obsessed me until, in the sunshine of a second summer day at
sea, the one empty chair on our crowded deck was filled. A man was
helped into it by a valet or male nurse, and a steward. My first glimpse
of his face as he sank down on to carefully placed cushions made my
heart jump in my breast with pity and protest against the hardness of
fate.

If he'd been old, or even middle-aged, or if he had been one of those
colourless characters dully sunk into chronic invalidism, I should have
felt only the pity without the protest. But he was young, and though it
was clear that he was desperately ill, it was clear, too, in a more
subtle, psychic way, that he had not been ill long; that love of life or
desire for denied happiness burned in him still.

Of course Jim was not really vexed because I discussed this man and
wondered about him, but my thoughts did play round that piteously
romantic figure a good deal, and it rather amused Jim to see me forget
the mystery of the cabin in favour of the cushioned chair.

"Once a Brightener, alw