on me that I was for him a walking,
breathing, incarnate proof of the efficacy of prayer. I was a little
fascinated by it--and then, could I have argued with him? You don't
argue against such evidence, and besides it would have looked as if
I had wanted to claim all the merit. Already his gratitude was simply
frightful. Funny position, wasn't it? The boredom came later, when we
lived together on board his ship. I had, in a moment of inadvertence,
created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don't know. One
gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that
friendship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a
tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul."

Heyst's tone was light, with the flavour of playfulness which seasoned
all his speeches and seemed to be of the very essence of his thoughts.
The girl he had come across, of whom he had possessed himself, to whose
presence he was not yet accustomed, with whom he did not yet know how to
live; that human being so near and still so strange, gave him a greater
sense of his own reality than he had ever known in all his life.

CHAPTER FOUR

With her knees drawn up, Lena rested her elbows on them and held her
head in both her hands.

"Are you tired of sitting here?" Heyst asked.

An almost imperceptible negative movement of the head was all the answer
she made.

"Why are you looking so serious?" he pursued, and immediately thought
that habitual seriousness, in the long run, was much more bearable than
constant gaiety. "However, this expression suits you exceedingly," he
added, not diplomatically, but because, by the tendency of his taste,
it was a true statement. "And as long as I can be certain that it is not
boredom which gives you this severe air, I am willing to sit here and
look at you till you are ready to go."

And this was true. He was still under the fresh sortilege of their
common life, the surprise of novelty, the flattered vanity of his
possession of this woman; for a man must feel that, unless he has ceased
to be masculine. Her eyes moved in his direction, rested on him,
then returned to their stare into the deeper gloom at the foot of the
straight tree-trunks, whose spreading crowns were slowly withdrawing
their shade. The warm air stirred slightly about her motionless head.
She would not look at him, from some obscure fear of betraying herself.
She felt in her innermost depths a