Possibly it was the rapt eulogiums of his friend Black—­who had spent the previous summer in Sark, and had ever since been seeking words strong enough in which to paint its charms—­that forced its name to the front when he stood facing the wide world, that lacked, for him at all events, a Margaret Brandt, and was therefore void and desolate.

“If ever you seek perfect peace, relief from your fellows, and the simple life, try Sark—­and see that you live in a cottage!” he remembered Adam Black murmuring softly, as they sat smoking at the Travellers’ one night, shortly after that memorable dinner of the Whitefriars’.  And then he had heaved a sigh of regret at thought of being where he was when he might have been in Sark.

Graeme knew nothing whatever of Sark save what his friend had let fall at times.  “Jersey, Guernsey, Alderney, and Sark,” recalled his short-jacket and broad-collar days, and the last of the quartette had always somehow conjured up in his mind the image of a bleak, inaccessible rock set in a stormy sea, where no one lived if he could possibly find shelter elsewhere,—­an Ultima Thule, difficult of access and still more difficult of exit, a weather-bound little spot into which you scrambled precariously by means of boats and ladders, and out of which you might not be able to get for weeks on end.

But Sark was to hold a very different place in his mind henceforth.  The name of Calais burnt itself into the heart of Queen Mary by reason of loss.  Surely on John Graeme’s heart the name of Sark may hope to find itself in living letters, for in Sark he was to find more than he had lost—­new grace and charm in life, new hopes, new life itself.

He had gone straight home from Lincoln’s Inn, and packed his portmanteau, knowing only that he was going away somewhere out of things, caring little where, so long as it was remote and lonely.

Fellow-man—­and especially woman—­was distasteful to him at the moment.  He craved only Solitude the Soother, and Nature the Healer.

He packed all he thought he might need for a couple of months’ stay, and among other things the manuscript he had been at work upon until more pressing matters intervened.  He felt, indeed, no slightest inclination towards it, or anything else, at present.  But that might come, for Work and he were tried friends.

He wrote briefly to Lady Elspeth telling her how things were with him, and that he was going away for a time.  He did not tell her where, for the simple reason that at the moment of writing he did not know himself.  Sark came into his mind later.

He told his landlady that he was going away for a change, and she remarked in motherly fashion that she was glad to hear it, and it was high time too.  He told her to keep all his letters till he sent for them.  He had no importunate correspondents, his next book was as good as placed, and all he desired at the moment was to cut the painter, and drift into some quiet backwater where he could lie up till life should wear a more cheerful face.