of
ever-sustained appeal about her. Even through the black gloom that
blanketed and blinded him some phantasmal and sub-conscious medium,
like the imaginary circuit of a multiplex telegraph system, seemed to
carry to his mind some secondary message, some thought that she herself
had not uttered. She, too, was suffering, but she had not shown it,
for such was her way, he remembered. A wave of sympathy obliterated
his resentment. He caught her in his arms, hungrily, and kissed her
abandonedly. He noticed that her skin was cold and moist.

"Oh, Jim," she murmured again, weakly.

"It's so long, isn't it?"

Then she added, with a little catch of the breath, as though even that
momentary embrace were a joy too costly to be countenanced, "Turn on
the lights, quick!"

"I can't," he told her. "I've cut the wires."

He felt at her blindly, through the muffling blackness. She was
shaking a little now, on his arm. It bewildered him to think how his
hunger for her could still obliterate all consciousness of time and
place.

"Why didn't you write?" she pleaded pitifully.

"I did write--a dozen times. Then I telegraphed!"

"Not a word came!" she cried.

"Then I wrote twice to London!"

"And _those_ never came. Oh, everything was against me!" she moaned.

"But how did you get here?" he still demanded.

She did not answer his question. Instead, she asked him: "Where did
you send the Paris letters?"

"To 11 bis avenue Beaucourt."

She groaned a little, impatiently.

"That was foolish--I wrote you that I was leaving there--that I _had_
to go!"

"Not a line reached me!"

He heard her little gasp of despair before she spoke.

"I was put out of there," she went on, hurriedly and evenly, yet with a
_vibrata_ of passion in her crowded utterance. "There wasn't a penny
left--the pupils I had gave up their lessons. What they had heard or
found out I don't know. Then I got a tiny room in the rue de Sevres.
I sold my last thing, then our wedding ring, even, to get it."

"And then what?"

"I still waited--I thought you would know, or find out, and that in
some way or other I should still hear from you. I would have gone to
the police, or advertised, but I knew it wouldn't be safe."

Once more the embittering consciousness of some dark coalition of
forces against them swept over him. Fate, at every step, had
frustrated them.

"I advertised twice, in the Herald?"

"Where would I see the Herald?"

"But