ribly to do. You see, he was all I had,
Roger, and I was hoping we would play the game out together. But--not
to have known Margarita? Never to have watched that bending droop of
her neck, that extraordinary colouring of her skin--a real Henner
skin! I remember Maurice Grau's telling me that he had always thought
Henner colour blind till he saw Margarita's neck in her name-part in
_Faust_.

The things that girl used to tell me, before she had any soul, of
course, and in the days when I was the third man to whom she had ever
spoken more than ten words in her life, were almost enough to pay for
all the pain she taught me. Such talks! I can close my eyes and
actually smell the sea-weed and the damp sand and hear the inrush of
the big combers. She used to sit in the lee of the rocks, all huddled
in that heavy, supple army-blue officer's cloak of hers with its
tarnished silver clasps, and talk as Miranda must have talked to
Ferdinand's old bachelor friend, who probably appreciated the
chance--too well, the poor old dog!

I had reached, I think, when I left off my plain unvarnished tale and
took to maundering, that precise point in it which exhibits Roger in
the act of replacing his hat upon his even then slightly greyish head
and striding on. It seems to me that he would not have checked in his
stride if the woman had replied after the usual tautological fashion
of her sex (we blame them for it, not thinking how wholly in nature it
is that they should be so, like the repeated notes of birds, the
persistence of the raindrops, the continual flicker of the sun through
the always fluttering leaves,) with some such phrase as, "No, indeed,
not in the least, I assure you!" or "Not at all, really--don't mention
it!" or even, "No, indeed," with a shy bow or a composed one, as the
case might be. But this woman uttered merely the syllable, "No," with
no modification nor variation, no inclination of the head, no movement
forward or back. Her utterance was grave, moreover, and precise; her
tone noticeably full and deep. Roger, pausing a moment in the shelter
of the news-stall, spoke again at the spur of some unexplainable
impulse.

"I was afraid I had stepped directly on your foot--it felt so," he
said.

Again she answered simply, "No," and that was his second chance. Now
in the face of these facts it is folly to contend that the woman
"accosted" him, as his cousin, who was one of the Boston Thayers, put
it to me. She did nothing o