He had bought tower and house three years ago, and he had spent there
many happy holidays, boating and fishing, alone, or in company of
some man chum. Sherston had never thought to bring a woman there,
for the morrow's bridegroom, for some six to seven years past, had
had an impatient contempt for, as well as fear of, women.

Sherston was a widower, though he never used the word, even in his
innermost heart, for to him the term connoted something slightly
absurd, and he was sensitive to ridicule.

Very few of the people at preset acquainted with the brilliant,
pleasantly eccentric architect, knew that he had been married
before. But of course the handful of old Bohemian comrades whom
he had faithfully kept from out of the past, were well aware of
the fact. They were not likely to forget it either, for whenever
it was mentioned, each of them at once remembered that which at
the time it had happened, Sherston had every reason to tell rather
than to conceal, namely, that the woman who had been his wife had
gone down with the Titanic.

But how long ago that now seemed!

The outbreak of war, which caused so much unmerited misfortune to
English artists and their like, and which at one moment had threatened
to wreck his own successful opening career, had brought to Shirley
Sherston a piece of marvelous good fortune..

Early in the memorable August, 1914, at a time when the fabric of
his life and work seemed shattered, and when the lameness which
he had so triumphantly coped with during his grown up life as to