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audibly: "Oh, Yvonne—sweetheart—forgive me, you'll have to forgive me for this! It was just that I worshiped you so. Put you in a shrine, and thought you weren't human. And then—someone else's arms—it killed me to think of you in someone else's arms. . . . But that's over. You're mine now. Mine!" He chattered it fiercely. "Mine! My wife! That's what you're going to be. And nobody else will ever so much as touch your hand."

He held then a little requiem over the past. He divided the things Yvonne had said, putting the ones that had stung him away into permanent oblivion, repeating the ones that were precious over and over, so that his lips should chisel them into the enduring tablets of his memory. . . . After a long time he stood up, laboriously, like a man just out of a sick-bed. He walked down the steps to the beach.

There was a weather-beaten wharf not a great distance away, and there he caught sight of Yvonne, standing on its far edge, gazing out at the ocean. Yvonne in her white fur . . . and she had taken off her hat, so that her hair was like the torch of a slender white candle. Yvonne. So beautiful. So glittering-beautiful . . .

And there was no problem in his mind any more. Nothing but a resolution, and a desire, and a new sharp ecstasy.

He began to run toward her, stumbling a little in the sand.

"Mail," observed Bones Allen to no one in particular.

He advanced into his room and took the thin stack