hair. It
was parted on one side, brushed back severely, and tied with a black
ribbon, without any bronze mist about her forehead or temple. This
smoothness added to the many varieties of her expression also that of
child-like innocence.

Great progress in our intimacy brought about unconsciously by our
enthusiastic interest in the matter of our discourse and, in the moments
of silence, by the sympathetic current of our thoughts. And this rapidly
growing familiarity (truly, she had a terrible gift for it) had all the
varieties of earnestness: serious, excited, ardent, and even gay. She
laughed in contralto; but her laugh was never very long; and when it had
ceased, the silence of the room with the light dying in all its many
windows seemed to lie about me warmed by its vibration.

As I was preparing to take my leave after a longish pause into which we
had fallen as into a vague dream, she came out of it with a start and a
quiet sigh. She said, "I had forgotten myself." I took her hand and was
raising it naturally, without premeditation, when I felt suddenly the arm
to which it belonged become insensible, passive, like a stuffed limb, and
the whole woman go inanimate all over! Brusquely I dropped the hand
before it reached my lips; and it was so lifeless that it fell heavily on
to the divan.

I remained standing before her. She raised to me not her eyes but her
whole face, inquisitively--perhaps in appeal.

"No! This isn't good enough for me," I said.

The last of the light gleamed in her long enigmatic eyes as if they were
precious enamel in that shadowy head which in its immobility suggested a
creation of a distant past: immortal art, not transient life. Her voice
had a profound quietness. She excused herself.

"It's only habit--or instinct--or what you like. I have had to practise
that in self-defence lest I should be tempted sometimes to cut the arm
off."

I remembered the way she had abandoned this very arm and hand to the
white-haired ruffian. It rendered me gloomy and idiotically obstinate.

"Very ingenious. But this sort of thing is of no use to me," I declared.

"Make it up," suggested her mysterious voice, while her shadowy figure
remained unmoved, indifferent amongst the cushions.

I didn't stir either. I refused in the same low tone.

"No. Not before you give it to me yourself some day."

"Yes--some day," she repeated in a breath in which there was no irony but
rather hesitation,