. She was so anxious to console, so interested in her
companion, herself, and the moment. He felt something unexpected and
irresistible.

"I would to God I could look at it like that!" he exclaimed suddenly.

The words had left his lips before he was conscious that the thought
which had lain at the back of them had found expression in his tone and
glance. Just at first they produced no other effect in her save that
evidenced by the gently upraised eyebrows, the sweetly tolerant smile.
And then a sudden cloud, scarcely of discomfiture, certainly not of
displeasure, more of unrest, swept across her face. Her eyes no longer
met his so clearly and frankly. There was a little mist there and a
silence. She was looking away through the windows to the dim, pearly
line of blue, the actual horizon of things present. Her pulses were
scarcely steady. She was possessed to a full extent of the her
qualities of courage, physical and spiritual, yet at that moment she
felt a wave of curious fear, the fear of the idealist that she may not
be true to herself.

The moment passed and she looked at him with a smile. An innate gift of
concealment, the heritage of her sex, came to her rescue, but she felt,
somehow or other, as though she had passed through one of the crises of
her life--that she could never be quite the same again. She had ceased
for those few seconds to be natural.

"What does that wish mean?" she asked. "Do you mean that you would like
to agree with me, or would you like to be twenty-nine?"

He too turned his back upon that little pool of emotion, did his best to
be natural and easy, to shut out the memory of that flaming moment.

"At twenty-nine," he told her, "I was First Secretary at St.
Petersburg. I am afraid that I was rather a dull dog, too. All Russia,
even then, was seething, and I was trying to understand. I never did.
No one ever understood Russia. The explanation of all that has happened
there is simply the eternal duplication of history--a huge class of
people, physically omnipotent, conscious of wrongs, unintelligent, and
led by false prophets. All revolutions are the same. The purging is
too severe, so the good remains undone."

There followed a silence, purposeful on her port, scarcely realised by
him. She sought for means of escape, to bring their conversation down
to the level where alone safety lay. She moved her chair a little
farther back into the scented chamber, as though she found the sunlight