And the next morning she rode to the Inlet with Malcourt, swam with him to the raft, and danced with him until dawn at “The Breakers.”

* * * * *

Mrs. Cardross and Jessie Carrick bent over their embroidery; Shiela continued her letter writing with Gray’s stylographic pen; Hamil, booted and spurred, both pockets stuffed with plans, paced the terrace waiting for his horse to be brought around; Malcourt had carried himself and his newspaper to the farther end of the terrace, and now stood leaning over the balustrade, an unlighted cigarette between his lips.

“I suppose you’ll go to Luckless Lake,” observed Hamil, pausing beside Malcourt in his walk.

“Yes.  There’s plenty to do.  We stripped ten thousand trout in October, and we’re putting in German boar this spring.”

“I should think your occupation would be fascinating.”

“Yes?  It’s lonely, too, until Portlaw’s camp parties begin.  I get an overdose of nature at times.  There’s nobody of my own ilk there except our Yale and Cornell foresters.  In winter it’s deadly, Hamil, deadly!  I don’t shoot, you know; it’s deathly enough as it is.”

“I don’t believe I’d find it so.”

“You think not, but you would.  That white solitude may be good medicine for some, but it makes me furious after a while, and I often wish that the woods and the deer and the fish and I myself and the whole devilish outfit were under the North Pole and frozen solid!  But I can’t afford to pick and choose.  If I looked about for something else to do I don’t believe anybody would want me.  Portlaw pays me more than I’m worth as a Harvard post-graduate.  And if that is an asset it’s my only one.”

Hamil, surprised at his bitterness, looked at him with troubled eyes.  Then his eyes wandered to Shiela, who had now taken up her embroidery.

“I can’t help it,” said Malcourt impatiently; “I like cities and people.  I always liked people.  I never had enough of people.  I never had any society as a boy; and, Hamil, you can’t imagine how I longed for it.  It would have been well for me to have had it.  There was never any in my own home; there was never anything in my home life but painful memories of domestic trouble and financial stress.  I was for a while asked to the homes of schoolmates, but could offer no hospitality in return.  Sensitiveness and humiliation have strained the better qualities out of me.  I’ve been bruised dry.”

He leaned on his elbows, hands clasped, looking out into the sunlight where myriads of brilliant butterflies were fluttering over the carpet of white phlox.