ntolerably, they tempt me to that degree that sometimes I can
hardly bear to look at them."

He glanced at the drawings. _He_ could hardly bear to look at them
either. Poor wraiths and skeletons of landscapes, he would have
thought them too fleshless and bloodless to touch even the ghost of
longing.

She took up the picture she had just laid down. "But _this_--it's
not painting, it's real; it's a piece torn out of the living world.
It would bring it so horribly near me--don't you see?"

He thought he saw. He looked, and she lowered her eyelids. On to
the slope of his wave there splashed a tear, salt to the salt.

She got up, turned away from him, and leaned against the window
frame, staring out at the gravel walk, the lawn, the paddock, all
the sedate, intolerable scene. Her breast heaved; she was shaken by
a tumult of vision and desire.

"If only I could get away--get away from this!"

It was not she that cried out, but some other self, unacknowledged
and unappeased, smothered and crushed and hidden out of sight.

Durant was moved by the revelation, and a little frightened, too.

"And why not get away?" he asked gently.

"Because I can't do anything like other people, by bits and halves.
If I once go, I shall never come back--never. There's no use
thinking about it. I've thought about it till I could have gone
mad." She faced him bravely. "Mr. Durant, if you ever want a thing
as badly as I want that, let me tell you that it will be simpler and
easier to give it up altogether, for always, than to keep on looking
at it and touching it and letting it go."

"Do you apply that principle to everything?"

"Nearly everything."

"H'm. Uncompromising. Yet I doubt if you are wise."

"Wise? Isn't it wiser to stand a little hunger than to go back to
starvation after luxury?"

"Oh, of course; at that rate you can bring your soul down to a straw
a day. But in the end, you know, it dies."

"If it comes to that, mine was dead ages ago, and buried quite
decently, too. I think we won't dig it up again; by this time it
might not look pretty."

At any other time she would have alienated his sympathy by that
nasty speech; it was the sort of thing he hated women to say. But he
forgave her because of her evident sincerity.

She dried her eyes and left him to his own reflections.

So this was Frida Tancred? And he had thought of her as the
Colonel's daughter, a poor creature, subdued to the tyranny of
habit. Habit indee