sch with her upon his arm. De Mersch himself hardly counted. He had a
way of glowing, but he paled ineffectual fires beside her maenadic glow.
There was something overpowering in the sight of her, in the fire of her
eyes, in the glow of her coils of hair, in the poise of her head. She
wore some kind of early nineteenth-century dress, sweeping low from the
waist with a tenderness of fold that affected one with delicate pathos,
that had a virgin quality of almost poignant intensity. And beneath it
she stepped with the buoyancy--the long steps--of a triumphing Diana.

It was more than terrible for me to stand there longing with a black,
baffled longing, with some of the base quality of an eavesdropper and
all the baseness of the unsuccessful.

Then Gurnard loomed in the distance, moving insensibly down the long,
glaring corridor, a sinister figure, suggesting in the silence of his
oncoming the motionless flight of a vulture. Well within my field of
sight he overtook them and, with a lack of preliminary greeting that
suggested supreme intimacy, walked beside them. I stood for some
moments--for some minutes, and then hastened after them. I was going to
do something. After a time I found de Mersch and Gurnard standing
facing each other in one of the doorways of the place--Gurnard, a small,
dark, impassive column; de Mersch, bulky, overwhelming, florid, standing
with his legs well apart and speaking vociferously with a good deal of
gesture. I approached them from the side, standing rather insistently at
his elbow.

"I want," I said, "I would be extremely glad if you would give me a
minute, monsieur." I was conscious that I spoke with a tremour of the
voice, a sort of throaty eagerness. I was unaware of what course I was
to pursue, but I was confident of calmness, of self-control--I was equal
to that. They had a pause of surprised silence. Gurnard wheeled and
fixed me critically with his eye-glass. I took de Mersch a little apart,
into a solitude of palm branches, and began to speak before he had asked
me my errand.

"You must understand that I would not interfere without a good deal of
provocation," I was saying, when he cut me short, speaking in a thick,
jovial voice.

"Oh, we will understand that, my good Granger, and then ..."

"It is about my sister," I said--"you--you go too far. I must ask you,
as a gentleman, to cease persecuting her."

He answered "The devil!" and then: "If I do not----?"

It was evident in hi