rain.

But the street was empty of Rachel, and he returned.

CHAPTER VII

They were in their bedroom undressing. Outside, the night rustled with
an approaching storm. On the closed windows the rain began a rattle of
water. A wind filled the darkness.

"What makes you act so strangely to-night, Erik?"

She looked at him as she stood uncovering herself. She desired to speak
with a disarming casualness. Instead, her words came with a sound of
tears in them. He was always strange--always going away from her until
she had to close her eyes and love in the dark without trying to see
him. Now he might go to war and be killed. Something would happen.
"Something ... something ..." kept murmuring itself in her thought.

"I love to hear you play to a crowd," he answered good-humoredly.

"Why?" She could not get the languor out of her voice.

"When people listen to music it always reminds me we are descended from
fish. God, what dolts! Minds like soft-bodied sea growths. I can
actually see them sometimes."

"You always dislike my friends."

She would argue with him, and in his anger his strangeness would go
away.

"Your friends?" He seemed pleased at the chance of growing angry. "Allow
me to point out to you that the assemblage to-night had the distinction
of being my friends. I discovered the collection. I brought them to the
house first."

"They think you're wonderful." She would get him angry that way.

"A virtue, I admit. But it doesn't excuse their other stupidities."

They seemed to have nothing to argue about. Anna loosened her hair. The
sight of it rolling in glistening bronzes and reds from her head
invariably gave her a desire to cover Erik's face in it. With his face
buried in the disordered masses of her hair she would feel an exquisite
fullness of love.

"You don't think Rachel stupid, do you?"

Dorn felt a relief at the sound of her name. His thought was full of
her, but he had been afraid to talk.

"Miss Laskin," he replied, concealing his eagerness for the topic with a
drawl, "is partially insane."

"Yes, you like insane people, though. I can always tell when you like
people. You never pay any attention to them then, but sort of come
hanging around me--as if you were apologizing to yourself for liking
them, and doing penance. Or you call them names."

"Miss Laskin," Dorn answered, delighted to protract the conversation,
"is a vivid sort of imbecile suffering from vacuous complexities