d to walk with her a little way.

She had stopped and was regarding him with singular directness.

"Why, certainly," she said.

They walked the little way permitted, and then, at her suggestion,
they sat together under the plane trees on one of the chairs in a
fairly solitary corner of the Place.

He saw now that she had changed her gown and that, over some
obscurer thing, she wore a long, dull purple coat with wide hanging
sleeves; her head was bound and wound, half-Eastern fashion, in a
purple veil, hiding her hair. In her dark garb, with all her colors
hidden, her brilliance extinguished, she was more wonderful than
ever, more than ever in keeping with the illusion of the tropics.

His hands trembled and his pulses beat as he found himself thus
plunged into the heart of the adventure. He might have been put off
by the sheer rapidity and facility of the thing, but for her serious
and somber air that seemed to open up depths, obscurities.

She sat very still, her profile slightly averted, and with one
raised hand she held her drifting veil close about her chin. They
sat thus in silence a moment, for her mystery embarrassed him. Then
(slowly and superbly) over her still averted shoulder she half
turned her head toward him.

"Well," she said, "haven't you anything to say for yourself? It's up
to you."

Then, nervously, he began to say things, to pay her the barefaced,
far from subtle, compliments that had served him once or twice
before on similar occasions (if any occasion could be called
similar). Addressed to her, they seemed somehow inadequate. He said
that, of course, inadequate he knew they were.

"I'm glad you think so," said Miss Lennox.

"I--I said I knew it."

"Oh--the things you know!"

"And the things _you_ know." He grew fervid. "Don't pretend you
don't know them. Don't pretend you don't know how a man feels when
he looks at you."

"And why should I pretend?"

She had turned round now with her whole body and faced him squarely.

"Why should you? Why should you?"

Lashed, driven as he judged she meant him to be by her composure,
his passion shook him and ran over, from the tips of his fingers
stroking the flung sleeve of her coat, from the tip of his tongue
uttering the provoked, inevitable things--things that came from him
hushed for the crowd, but, for her, hurried, vehement, unveiled.

She listened without saying one word; she listened without looking
at him, looking, rather, straigh