The dynamic energy which radiated from Franklin did much, so far as Fraser was concerned, to spoil the exquisite peace and lassitude of the night. All the poet in him gave him the keys with which to open some of the unnoticed doors to Nature's storehouses of beauty and called him to stand very still and fill his brain and soul with the sight that met his eyes. He had never felt prouder of his country than when he revelled in the picture of the moon-touched Sound, magic with the reflection of a multitude of stars, and ran his eyes along the dim outline of shore to his right and caught the bright eyes of thousands of cheerful lights. It seemed to him that Nature, with the proud consciousness of her genius as an artist, had outdone herself in setting a scene for the human comedy in which he had been cast for the second male part. Water and moon and stars, the mystery of night, the feeling of illimitable space, the scent of sleeping flowers, the whisper of fairies, all as old and even older than the hills—surely this was an appropriate setting for the working out of the ancient and inevitable drama, the ever-recurring clash, between a man and a woman.
"Go ahead, Pel," he said. "This morning in New York you left this strange story of yours at the point where the entrance of York into it made you decide to marry Beatrix. I have not got the novelist's brain so I can't for the life of me see what can have happened in the chapter that has been begun since then."
"My dear chap," said Franklin, flinging the end of a cigarette over the wall, "don't you know that more impossible things are done every hour in life than ever find their way into books?"
"Yes, I know that."
"Well, the thing that I should have thought the very limit of impossibility happened here, on this very spot, this afternoon when I got back. Take a guess."
Fraser's answer came quickly. "Beatrix loves you."
There was no mirth in Franklin's laugh. "Guess again."
"You love Beatrix."
"A precious clever fellow, aren't you? What the devil made you get to love so quickly? I expected you to flounder through a dozen guesses and then be wide of the mark."
"A man and a woman and love," said Fraser. "Why hire a detective to make a mystery of that? It's any poet's job."