e fingertips of one hand resting
on the immaculate cloth. "A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw,
hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this
table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that
nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the
shorter of the two who's coming--the gentleman who, in the play of his
shoulders as he walks, and in his facial structure, recalls a Jaguar.
Ah, you don't know what a jaguar is? But you have had a good look at
these two. It's the short one, you know, who's to be our guest."

She made a sign with her head that she knew; Heyst's insistence brought
Ricardo vividly before her mental vision. A sudden languor, like the
physical echo of her struggle with the man, paralysed all her limbs.
She lay still in the chair, feeling very frightened at this
phenomenon--ready to pray aloud for strength.

Heyst had started to pace the room.

"Our guest! There is a proverb--in Russia, I believe--that when a
guest enters the house, God enters the house. The sacred virtue of
hospitality! But it leads one into trouble as well as any other."

The girl unexpectedly got up from the chair, swaying her supple figure
and stretching her arms above her head. He stopped to look at her
curiously, paused, and then went on:

"I venture to think that God has nothing to do with such a hospitality
and with such a guest!"

She had jumped to her feet to react against the numbness, to discover
whether her body would obey her will. It did. She could stand up, and
she could move her arms freely. Though no physiologist, she concluded
that all that sudden numbness was in her head, not in her limbs. Her
fears assuaged, she thanked God for it mentally, and to Heyst murmured a
protest:

"Oh, yes! He's got to do with everything--every little thing. Nothing
can happen--"

"Yes," he said hastily, "one of the two sparrows can't be struck to the
ground--you are thinking of that." The habitual playful smile faded on
the kindly lips under the martial moustache. "Ah, you remember what you
have been told--as a child--on Sundays."

"Yes, I do remember." She sank into the chair again. "It was the only
decent bit of time I ever had when I was a kid, with our landlady's two
girls, you know."

"I wonder, Lena," Heyst said, with a return to his urbane playfulness,
"whether you are just a little child, or whether you represent something
as old as the world.