lf-revelation of a half-hour ago; I should at least prove myself the
capable mummer; yet I found that I was fettered by an unaccustomed
silence.

There was only one topic on which I could find words for talk with this
woman and that topic was forbidden. She, too, for some unaccountable
reason, seemed hampered by a diffidence which her bearing told me was
foreign to her normal nature. So, for a while, our conversation lagged
and faltered and fell into fitful fragments and puerile tatters, while
my gaze devoured her. There was no flaw in the perfection of her beauty
from the coils of her amber and honey hair to the white satin toe of her
small slipper. I had given opulent scope to my painter's fancy in those
island days and had imagined her, in the color of life, as a being
expressed in the souls of orchids. Now I realized, with a terrible
yearning, that I had not done her justice.

Step by step I went back over the record of the last year and found it
painfully distinct and clear. I had, with my imagination built a house
of cards which had tottered. I had been lonely and morbid and had
pretended a picture was a woman. It had come to mean a great deal--clay
idols have come to mean immortal gods to poor creatures who have had no
better deities. I had told myself that the finger of Destiny had traced
through my life a thread of gold linking my life to hers. After all it
had been nothing more than a series of inconceivable coincidences. I had
no more part in her cosmos than in that of any woman whose photograph I
might have admired in a miscellaneous collection. It behooved me to
scourge out of my brain the mischievous chimeras I had harbored there.
As for her momentary excitement--the something vague and deep and
disturbed in her pupils as she stood at the door and later when we
touched hands; that was only the psychic realization that this guest of
her husband was staring at her out of insanely wild eyes.

I started to speak, then halted, perplexed over a ridiculous point. How
should I address her? On the island I had called her Frances, and now I
could no more compel my rebellious tongue to frame the title "Mrs.
Weighborne" than I could have forced it to utter an epithet. So I said
nothing at all.

"You are a great traveler, aren't you, Mr. Deprayne?" she suggested when
the silence had begun to be oppressive.

[Illustration: "You are a great traveler, aren't you, Mr. Deprayne?" she
suggested when the silence had begu