he subject?"

She answered him briefly, "Yes."

She kept her face turned seawards. She was suddenly and overwhelmingly
conscious of bodily weakness. All her strength seemed to have gone into
that one great effort, that at the moment had seemed no effort at all.
She felt as if she were going to faint, and gripped herself with all her
quivering resolution, praying wildly that he might not notice.

He did not notice. For a few seconds more he stood behind her, while she
waited, palpitating, for his next move. Then, very suddenly he turned
and left her.

And Olga, instantly relaxing from a tension too terrible to be born,
covered her face with her hands and shuddered over and over again in
sick disgust.

It was many minutes before she recovered, minutes during which her mind
seemed to be almost too stunned for thought. Very gradually at length
she began to remember the words she had last uttered, the weapon she had
used; and numbly she wondered at herself.

No, she had scarcely acted on her own initiative. Her action had been
prompted by some force of which till that moment she had had no
knowledge, a force great enough to lift her above her own natural
impulses, great enough to help her in her sore strait, and to make all
other things seem of small importance.

What would Max have said to that emphatic declaration of hers? But
surely it was Max, and none other, who had inspired it.
Surely--surely--ah, what was this that was happening to her? What magic
was at work? She suddenly lifted her face to the dazzling summer sky. A
brief giddiness possessed her--and passed. She was as one over whom a
mighty wave had dashed. She came up from it, breathless, trembling, yet
with a throbbing ecstasy at her heart such as she had never known
before. For the impossible had happened to her. She realized it now.
She--Olga Ratcliffe, the ordinary, the colourless, the prosaic--was
caught in the grip of the Unknown Power, that Immortal Wonder which for
lack of a better name men call Romance. And she knew it, she exulted in
it, she stretched out her woman's hands to grasp it, as a babe will
seek to grasp the sunshine, possessing and possessed.

In that moment she acknowledged that the bitter struggle through which
she had just come had been indeed worth while. It had exhausted her,
terrified her; but it had shown her her heart in such a fashion as to
leave no room for doubt or misunderstanding. Even yet she quivered with
the rapture o