was a searching question.

"Perhaps you already know what my business is. I have a colliery; I
work with the miners, and spend my day underground."

"Ah, that explains everything," said Angela, regarding him with tender
sympathy. "Now I understand that you are indeed right. It would be
terrible to condemn a woman to the sufferings a miner's wife must
endure. What can be more terrible than to take leave of her husband
each morning, not knowing whether they will ever meet again; to know
he is in the depths of the earth while she breathes the fresh air of
heaven; to fancy her beloved is perhaps buried alive, and she cannot
hear his cries for help; that even if it is not so, that he is
surrounded by a deadly atmosphere, that it only needs a spark to
become a hell, in which her darling would be lost to her forever? I
can understand how a woman's heart would break under such a daily
agony; even to her child she would say, 'Do not run so fast, else a
stone may fall on your father's head and kill him.'" Then, with a
sudden change of expression, Angela turned angrily to Ivan. "But why
do you stay down in the mine like a common miner?"

"Because it is my element, as the battle-field is that of the soldier,
the sea of the sailor, the desert of the traveller. It is with me as
it is with them--a passion. I love the mysterious darkness of the
world underground."

The warmth with which Ivan spoke these words kindled an answering
enthusiasm in his listener.

"Every passion is absorbing," she said, "especially the passion for
creation and for destruction. I understand how a woman would follow a
man she loved, not only to the field, but into the battle itself,
although the art of war has now become a very prosaic and second-class
affair, and has lost every trace of idealism. I confess, however, the
heroism of the miner is to me incomprehensible. A man who occupies
himself with dead, cold stones is to me like that Prince Badrul-Buder
in the 'Arabian Nights,' who was turned into a stone, and whose wife
preferred a living slave to her marble husband. I prefer those who
penetrate to unknown regions of the globe, and I could envy the wife
of Sir Samuel Baker, who travelled by his side all through the deserts
of South Africa, holding in one hand a pistol, while the other hand
was clasped in that of her husband. Together they bore the burning
heat, together repulsed the savage wild beasts. Hand in hand they
appeared before the King of Mor