rther
resonances.

"There is a sort of generous ardour about you," she said, "which I don't
really understand. No, I don't know it. Believe me, it is not of myself
I am thinking. And you--you are going out to-night to make another
landing."

"Yes, it is a fact that before many hours I will be sailing away from you
to try my luck once more."

"Your wonderful luck," she breathed out.

"Oh, yes, I am wonderfully lucky. Unless the luck really is yours--in
having found somebody like me, who cares at the same time so much and so
little for what you have at heart."

"What time will you be leaving the harbour?" she asked.

"Some time between midnight and daybreak. Our men may be a little late
in joining, but certainly we will be gone before the first streak of
light."

"What freedom!" she murmured enviously. "It's something I shall never
know. . . ."

"Freedom!" I protested. "I am a slave to my word. There will be a
siring of carts and mules on a certain part of the coast, and a most
ruffianly lot of men, men you understand, men with wives and children and
sweethearts, who from the very moment they start on a trip risk a bullet
in the head at any moment, but who have a perfect conviction that I will
never fail them. That's my freedom. I wonder what they would think if
they knew of your existence."

"I don't exist," she said.

"That's easy to say. But I will go as if you didn't exist--yet only
because you do exist. You exist in me. I don't know where I end and you
begin. You have got into my heart and into my veins and into my brain."

"Take this fancy out and trample it down in the dust," she said in a tone
of timid entreaty.

"Heroically," I suggested with the sarcasm of despair.

"Well, yes, heroically," she said; and there passed between us dim
smiles, I have no doubt of the most touching imbecility on earth. We
were standing by then in the middle of the room with its vivid colours on
a black background, with its multitude of winged figures with pale limbs,
with hair like halos or flames, all strangely tense in their strained,
decorative attitudes. Dona Rita made a step towards me, and as I
attempted to seize her hand she flung her arms round my neck. I felt
their strength drawing me towards her and by a sort of blind and
desperate effort I resisted. And all the time she was repeating with
nervous insistence:

"But it is true that you will go. You will surely. Not because of those
peop