, because her eyes are at once wistful and compelling;
but on this occasion it was startling. They held mine for some seconds,
and I caught in them a glimpse of the hieroglyphic of the woman's soul.
Then she turned her head slowly and looked again into the fire.

"Now?" she echoed. "Many things have happened between then and now. If
he is alive and I go to him, I'll try to think again that I love him. It
will be the only way. It will save me from playing hell with my life."

"I am glad you see your relations to Dale in that light," said I.

"I wasn't thinking of Dale," she said calmly.

"Of what, then, if I may ask without impertinence?"

She broke into a laugh which ended in a sigh, and then swung her
splendid frame away from the fireplace and walked backwards and
forwards, her figure swaying and her arms flung about in unrestrained
gestures.

"You are quite right," she said, with an odd note of hardness in her
voice. "You're quite right in what you said the other day--that it was
high time I went back to my husband. I pray God he is not dead. I have
a feeling that he isn't. He can't be. I count on you to find him and ask
him to meet me. It would be better than writing. I don't know what to
say when I have a pen in my hand. You must find him and speak to him and
send me a wire and I'll come straight away to any part of the earth. Or
would you like me to come with you and help you find him? But no; that's
idiotic. Forget that I have said it. I'm a fool. But he must be found.
He must, he must!"

She paused in her swinging about the room for which I was sorry, as her
panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed
at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands. I was puzzled to find an
adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst. Hitherto she had
accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic
calm. Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into space,
she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him. And why had her
salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale? There is obviously
another range of emotions at work beneath it all; but what their nature
is baffles me. Although I contemplate with equanimity my little
corner in the Garden of Prosperpine, and with indifference this common
lodging-house of earth, and although I view mundane affairs with the
same fine, calm, philosophic, satirical eye as if I were already a
disembodied spirit, yet I do not li