Page:Love Insurance - Earl Biggers (1914).djvu/159

136 said. "No man can ever know the true inwardness of the word lonesome until he's seen Tarragona."

Minot hesitated. Ought he to leave the scene of action? Of action? He glanced about him. There was less action here than in a Henry James novel. The tangle of events in which he was involved rested for a siesta.

So he and Mr. Paddock drove along the narrow neck of land that led from the mainland to Tarragona Island. They entered the kingdom of the lonely. Sandy beach with the ocean on one side, swamps on the other. Scrubby palms, disreputable foliage, here and there a cluster of seemingly deserted cottages—the world and its works apparently a million miles away. Yet out on one corner of that bleak forgotten acre stood the slim outline of a wireless, and in a little white house lived a man who, amid the sea-gulls and the sand-dunes, talked daily with great ships and cities far away.

"I told you it was lonesome," said Mr. Paddock.

"Lonesome," shivered Minot. "Even God has