n irresistible desire to give herself
up to him more completely, by some act of absolute sacrifice. This was
something of which he did not seem to have an idea. He was a strange
being without needs. She felt his eyes fixed upon her; and as he kept
silent, she said uneasily--for she didn't know what his silences might
mean:

"And so you lived with that friend--that good man?"

"Excellent fellow," Heyst responded, with a readiness that she did not
expect. "But it was a weakness on my part. I really didn't want to, only
he wouldn't let me off, and I couldn't explain. He was the sort of man
to whom you can't explain anything. He was extremely sensitive, and it
would have been a tigerish thing to do to mangle his delicate feelings
by the sort of plain speaking that would have been necessary. His
mind was like a white-walled, pure chamber, furnished with, say, six
straw-bottomed chairs, and he was always placing and displacing them
in various combinations. But they were always the same chairs. He was
extremely easy to live with; but then he got hold of this coal idea--or,
rather, the idea got hold of him, it entered into that scantily
furnished chamber of which I have just spoken, and sat on all the
chairs. There was no dislodging it, you know! It was going to make his
fortune, my fortune, everybody's fortune. In past years, in moments of
doubt that will come to a man determined to remain free from absurdities
of existence, I often asked myself, with a momentary dread, in what way
would life try to get hold of me? And this was the way. He got it into
his head that he could do nothing without me. And was I now, he asked
me, to spurn and ruin him? Well, one morning--I wonder if he had gone
down on his knees to pray that night!--one morning I gave in."

Heyst tugged violently at a tuft of dried grass, and cast it away from
him with a nervous gesture.

"I gave in," he repeated.

Looking towards him with a movement of her eyes only, the girl noticed
the strong feeling on his face with that intense interest which his
person awakened in her mind and in her heart. But it soon passed away,
leaving only a moody expression.

"It's difficult to resist where nothing matters," he observed. "And
perhaps there is a grain of freakishness in my nature. It amused me
to go about uttering silly, commonplace phrases. I was never so well
thought of in the islands till I began to jabber commercial gibberish
like the veriest idiot. Upon my wor