But the words so inadequate that they inhibited whatever she would have liked to confide in him, for fear of another adolescent stunted comment. His appearance of maturity was belied by the clumsy words. So she said vaguely: "I'm homesick for all the beach towns I have known, Capri, Mallorca, the south of France, Venice, the Italian Riviera, South America. "

"I understand that," he said. "I was homesick when I first came to this country from Ireland."

"A year ago I was dancing on the beach under palm trees. The music was wild, and the waves washed our feet while we danced."

"Yes, I know. I was a bodyguard for a rich man. Everybody sat in the port cafés at night. It was like the Fourth of July every night. Come along, I'll take you to my home. The wife and kids are asleep, but I can give you some aspirin."

She sat beside him. He continued to recall his life as a bodyguard, when he had traveled all around the world. He controlled the car without a dissonance.

"I hate this town," she said vehemently.

He had driven smoothly beside a neat white house. He said: "Wait here," and went into the house.

When he returned he was carrying a glass of water and two aspirin in the palm of his hand. Sabina's nerves began to untangle. She took the water and aspirin obediently.

He turned his powerful flashlight upon a bush in his garden and said: "Look at this!"

In the night she saw flowers of velvet with black hearts and gold eyes.

"What kind of a flower is that?" she asked, to please him.

"Roses of Sharon," he said reverently and with the purest of Irish accents. "They only grow in Ireland and on Long Island."

Sabina's rebellion was subsiding. She felt a tenderness for the roses of Sharon, for the policeman's protectiveness, for his effort to find a substitute for tropical flowers, a little beauty in the present night.

"I'll sleep now," she said. "You can drop me off at the Penny Cottage."

"Oh no," he said, sitting at the wheel. "We'll drive around by the sea until you're so sleepy you can't bear it anymore. You can't sleep, you know, until you find something to be grateful for, you can never sleep when you're angry."

She could not hear very distinctly his long and rambling stories about his life as a bodyguard, except when he said: "There's two of you giving me trouble with homesickness today. The other was a young fellow in the English Air Corps. Aviator all through the war, seventeen when he volunteered. He's grounded now, and he can't take it. He's restless and keeps speeding and breaking traffic laws. The red lights drive him crazy. When I saw what it was, I stopped giving him tickets. He's used to airplanes. Being grounded is tough. I know how he feels."