he had gained in these months. For some
reason he was letting go of life.

"Why is that? Is it because he is letting go of you?"

The Frenchman's leonine countenance took on a hostile expression. He
persisted:

"Eh? Is it you who have done this?"

And Lilla understood that to this old devotee of the arts she had
ceased to be anything except a means to an end.

He seemed contemptible to her with his red-rimmed, fiery eyes, his
Viking mustaches that had turned truculent, his whole aspect of
animosity at this last collapse of hope. And of a sudden she divined
the true basis of those hopes of his--the longing for at least some
vicarious creation, the desire to escape, in part, his own sense of
defeat by aiding, and, therefore, sharing, the triumphs of another. He
put himself in her path: he would not let her go. He was preparing to
hurl at her, who knew what reproaches.

"Oh, get out of my way!" she cried at last, in a breaking voice. She
pushed him aside so sharply that he tottered back on his heels. She
rushed out of the room, downstairs, into her car.

The limousine sped northward into the country.

She watched the placid fields, the wooded hill-tops, the lanes that
wound away between walls of sumac. She thought of another unexpected
ride toward another crisis of life. Her heart was beating wildly; her
breathing was labored; her hands twitched open and shut. She took the
mirror from its rack, and saw her pupils extraordinarily dilated, so
that her eyes appeared black.

The car left the highway, to enter a park of well-grown trees. She
caught sight of the low, simple mass of the house; its walls of gray
plaster rising between two clumps of evergreens, beyond a garden laid
out in grassy stages, where flagstone paths wound away between beds of
heliotrope. On the terrace, under an awning of striped canvas, stood a
man in a dark-blue robe that opened down the front to reveal a white
under robe confined with a scarlet sash. He had a close-fitting
skullcap on his head, of white, embroidered linen. He was
Hamoud-bin-Said.

She passed him without a second glance, and found herself face to face
with the physician, who was just starting back to town.

Dr. Fallows began to talk to her judicially and suavely, with a tone of
regret, but possibly with an undertone of contentment: for this case,
after having immensely bewildered him for a time, was now, at last,
imitating all the proper symptoms again. Th