savages. Didn't you find that
out this afternoon, when we were in Tetuan? But of course you couldn't.
You couldn't know you'd married such an infernal lunatic."

He broke off. She was watching him with a close attention, and her body
had ceased to tremble under his arm.

"Go on, Desmond."

"You want me to tell you the sort of man you've married?"

"I want you to tell me what you mean."

"Then I will. Claire, this afternoon I took you away from that
snake-charming chap because--well, because you watched him as if he
fascinated you."

"Oh!"

"Of course I knew why. His performance was clever, and he was
picturesque in his way, although, to be sure, it was all put on, as far
as that goes."

"Like my stage performances, Desmond."

"Claire," he said hotly. "How can you?"

"That man acts far better than I do--if he acts at all."

"Was that why he interested you so much?"

"In what other way could he interest me?"

Renfrew kicked at one of the blazing logs and sent up a shower of
red-hot flakes.

"Well, there was your dream, Claire."

"Yes, there was that."

"It was curious, coming just before we saw the fellow. And you say the
two men were alike."

"I did not say alike. I said the same."

"How could that be?"

"How can a thousand things be? Yet we cannot deny them when they are,
any more than we can deny that we feel an earthly immortality within us
and yet crumble into dust. In sleep I saw that man. I saw his snake. I
heard him play."

"Yes, Claire, I know. It's damned strange."

Renfrew's forehead was wrinkled in a meditative frown.

"But, after all, what's a dream?" he exclaimed. "A vagary of a sleeping
brain. And in your dream you wouldn't go to that beggar, Claire."

"No. I wouldn't go, and so I died."

"It all means nothing--nothing at all."

She looked at him gravely.

"I wonder whether there are things in life that we are compelled to do,
Desmond," she said. "I sometimes think there must be. How otherwise can
a thousand strange events be accounted for, especially things that women
do?"

"I don't know," he muttered, staring at her anxiously in the firelight.

"Every one acknowledges the irresistible power of physical force over
physical weakness. Some day, perhaps, when the world has grown a little
older, we shall all understand that the power of mental force is
precisely similar, and can as little be resisted. What's that?"

Renfrew felt that she was suddenly alert. Her thin form