shrugged her shoulders impatiently and did not answer. Keyork
relinquished the fencing.

"It is of no importance," he said, changing his tone. "Your dream--or
whatever it was--seems to have been the second of your two experiences.
You said there were two, did you not? What was the first?"

Unorna sat silent for some minutes, as though collecting her thoughts.
Keyork, who never could have enough light, busied himself with another
lamp. The room was now brighter than it generally was in the daytime.

Unorna watched him. She did not want to make confidences to him, and yet
she felt irresistibly impelled to do so. He was a strange compound of
wisdom and levity, in her opinion, and his light-hearted moods were
those which she most resented. She was never sure whether he was in
reality tactless, or frankly brutal. She inclined to the latter view of
his character, because he always showed such masterly skill in excusing
himself when he had gone too far. Neither his wisdom nor his love of
jesting explained to her the powerful attraction he exercised over her
whole nature, and of which she was, in a manner, ashamed. She could
quarrel with him as often as they met, and yet she could not help being
always glad to meet him again. She could not admit that she liked him
because she dominated him; on the contrary, he was the only person she
had ever met over whom she had no influence whatever, who did as he
pleased without consulting her, and who laughed at her mysterious power
so far as he himself was concerned. Nor was her liking founded upon any
consciousness of obligation. If he had helped her to the best of his
ability in the great experiment, it was also clear enough that he had
the strongest personal interest in doing so. He loved life with a mad
passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find
a means of living longer than other men. All the aims and desires and
complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression--the
wish to live. To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be
capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from
the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say. The
wisdom of ages bids us beware of the man of one idea. He is to be feared
for his ruthlessness, for his concentration, for the singular strength
he has acquired in the centralization of his intellectual power, and
because he has welded, as it were, the rough metal of many pa