The island was separated from the mainland by an arm of the sea, wide
enough to keep at a safe distance the fashionable cottagers in the
adjacent community.

Fire had destroyed the large frame cottage which the Westfields had
occupied, but there was a small bark bungalow of two rooms and a
kitchen that had been used, he learned, as quarters for extra guests,
which would exactly suit his purposes. Somewhat doubtfully, he made
inquiries upon the mainland and communicated with the agents of
Mrs. Westfield in New York, with whom, to his delight, he managed to
make the proper arrangements pending the rebuilding of the house.

He had established himself bag and baggage and at the end of two weeks
a row of canvases along the wall of his room bore testimony to his
diligence. To Markham they had been weeks of undiluted happiness. He
was working out in his own way some theses of color which would in
time prove to others that he knew Nature as well as he knew humanity;
that the brutal truths people saw in his portraits were only brutal
because they were true; and to prove to himself that somewhere in him,
deeply hidden, was a vein of tenderness which now sought expression.
Every day he was learning something. This morning for instance he had
risen before daylight to try an effect in grays that he had missed two
days before.

The day had just begun and Markham stood before his tripod facing to
the westward painting madly, trying, in the few short moments that
remained to him before sunrise, to put upon his canvas the evanescent
tints of the dawn. He painted madly because the canvas was not yet
covered and because he knew that within twenty minutes at the most the
sun would rise behind him and the witching mystery of the half-light