come, and in preparation for the summer season the house at Fair
Harbor must be opened and set in order, and the presence there of
some one of the Page family was easily explained.

She made the three hours' run to Fair Harbor in her car, driving
it herself, and as the familiar landfalls fell into place, she
doubted if it would not have been wiser had she stayed away. For
she found that the memories of more than twenty summers at Fair
Harbor had been wiped out by those of one summer, by those of one
man. The natives greeted her joyously: the boatmen, the
fishermen, her own grooms and gardeners, the village postmaster,
the oldest inhabitant. They welcomed her as though they were her
vassals and she their queen. But it was the one man she had
exiled from Fair Harbor who at every turn wrung her heart and
caused her throat to tighten. She passed the cottage where he had
lodged, and hundreds of years seemed to have gone since she used
to wait for him in the street, blowing noisily on her automobile
horn, calling derisively to his open windows. Wherever she turned
Fair Harbor spoke of him. The golf-links; the bathing beach; the
ugly corner in the main street where he always reminded her that
it was better to go slow for ten seconds than to remain a long
time dead; the old house on the stone wharf where the schooners
made fast, which he intended to borrow for his honeymoon; the
wooden trough where they always drew rein to water the ponies;
the pond into which he had waded to bring her lilies.

On the second day of her stay she found she was passing these
places purposely, that to do so she was going out of her way.
They no longer distressed her, but gave her a strange comfort.
They were old friends, who had known her in the days when she was