He lay on his back in the full sun. There was no one he wanted in the world but Ethel Cameron. If their marriage was to come to nothing, all he had been living for and building on since before his thirties was wasted; he wanted nothing else in its stead and did not know how he could go on alone. Losing his sons was bad enough; but worse by far seemed his loss of Ethel. The boys would grow up and leave, eventually pursuing lives of their own, remote from his; and that was as it should be. But to lose Ethel—to think of trying to go on without her—meant no future for him whatever. In a few weeks, perhaps, he could make another attempt to recover her and so restore their marriage; but failing that (and there had been an awful certainty of purpose in her attitude which suggested darkly that he would fail), what should he do with his life? Move on to some small college, live out the rest of his anonymous days alone? And what of Ethel? Would she find another man to love, to give her the love which perhaps he had not given always to his fullest? But Ethel did not discover other men easily. Having found the one man she loved—having given herself up to him—it would be impossible to do so with another. With Ethel, love came only once. So it did with him—the kind of love he and Ethel had had, the only kind he wanted in his life.

It had been despicable to let her go without making any real effort to stop her; dangerous, too. Because of what had happened, he knew that Ethel was all but irresponsible for whatever she might do now; the blow that he had been expecting to fall may not have been last night’s fateful revelation, after all—it might well come through Ethel, something she might do because of the desperate lengths she had been driven to. Even though he was aware of this, he had stood by as if all were well; had turned his head and looked the other way, so to speak, and let Ethel go off in her misery alone. Why had he let her do this; what kept him here, helpless? It was certainly not because of Clifford Hauman. He felt so strongly about Cliff at the moment, almost with a kind of anger, that he would gladly have accepted the fact that they were never to meet again. There was only one way to ensure this; he could leave the island, as Ethel had done, and the Haumans would pass out of his life forever. But because of some inexplicable reason he still stayed.