aused, then added, in an almost light and much more impersonal
voice:

"I think I may say that I'm a connoisseur of values. And I hate to see a
good thing flung away."

"I'm not a good thing. Perhaps I might have become one. I believe I was
on the way to becoming worth something. But now I'm nothing, and I wish
to be nothing."

"I don't wish you to be anything but what you are."

"Once you telegraphed to me--'May Allah have you in His hand.'"

"I remember."

"It's turned out differently," he said, almost with brutality.

"We don't know that. You came back."

"Yes. I was kept safe for a very good reason. I had to kill my child.
I've accomplished that mission, and now, perhaps, Allah will let me
alone."

She could not see his face or the expression in his eyes clearly, but
now she saw his body move sharply. It twisted to the right and back
again. She put out her hand and took his listlessly, almost as she had
taken it in Mrs. Chetwinde's drawing-room when she had met him for the
first time.

"Your hand is like fire," he whispered.

"Do you think I am ice?" she whispered back, huskily.

"Once I tried to take my hand away from yours."

"Try to take it away now, if you wish."

As she spoke she closed her hand tenaciously upon his. Her little
fingers felt almost like steel on his hand, and he thought of the
current of the Bosporus which had pulled at his swimming body.

To be taken and swept away! That at least would be better than
drifting, better than death in the form of life, better than slinking in
loneliness to watch the doings of others.

"I don't wish to take it away," he said.

And with the words mentally he bade an eternal farewell to Rosamund and
to all the aspirations of his youth. From her and from them he turned
away to follow the gleam of the torch. It flickered through the
darkness; it wavered; it waited--for him. He had tried the life of
wisdom, and it had cast him out; perhaps there was a place for him in
the unwise life. He felt spiritually exhausted; but there was within
him a physical fever which answered to the fever in the hand which had
closed on his.

"Let the spirit die," he thought, "that the body may live!"

He put one arm round his companion.

"If you want me----" he whispered, on a deep breath.

His voice died away in the darkness between the giant cypresses, those
trees which watch over the dead in the land of the Turk.

_She_ had said once that the human being can h