uncertainty regarding him had long
since passed away. Though she was far from understanding him, he had
become an intimate friend, and she treated him as such. True, he was
unlike any other man she had ever met, but that fact had ceased to
embarrass her. She accepted him as he was.

He came back at length and sat down, smiling at her, though
somewhat grimly.

"You will pardon your poor jester," he said, "if he fails to make a joke
on your last night. He could make jokes--plenty of them, but not of the
sort that would please you."

Anne said nothing. She would not, if she could help it, betray to any
how much she was dreading the morrow. But she felt that he knew it in
spite of her.

His next words revealed the fact. "You are going to purgatory," he
said, "and I am going to perdition. Do you know, I sometimes wonder if
we shouldn't do better to turn and fly in the face of the gods when
they drive us too hard? Why do we give in when we've nothing to gain
and all to lose?"

She met his look with her steadfast eyes. "Does duty count as
nothing?" she said.

He made an impatient movement, and would have spoken, but she
stopped him.

"Please don't rail at duty. I know your creed is pleasure, but the
pursuit of pleasure does not, after all, bring happiness."

"Who wants pleasure?" demanded Nap fiercely. "That's only the anesthetic
when things get unbearable. You use duty in the same way. But what we
both want, what we both hanker for, starve for, is just life! Who cares
if there is pain with it? I don't, nor do you. And yet we keep on
stunting and stultifying ourselves with these old-fashioned remedies for
a disease we only half understand, when we might have all the world and
then some. Oh, we're fools--we're fools!" His voice rang wildly
passionate. He flung out his arms as if he wrestled with something.
"We've been cheated for centuries of our birthright, and we still put up
with it, still bring our human sacrifices to an empty shrine!"

And there he broke off short, checked suddenly at the height of his
outburst though she had made no second effort to stop him.

Her quiet eyes had not flinched from his. She had made no sign of
shrinking. With the utmost patience she had listened to him. Yet by some
means intangible the fiery stream of his rebellion was stayed.

There fell a brief silence. Then he rose. "I am afraid I am not fit for
civilised society to-night," he said. "I will say good-bye." He held her
hand