Splendid!" cried Keyork, clapping his hands loudly together.
"I did you an injustice, my dear Unorna. You are not so nervous as I
thought, since you forgot nothing. What a woman! Ghost-proof, and able
to think connectedly even at such a moment! But tell me, did you not
take the opportunity of suggesting something else?" His eyes twinkled
merrily, as he asked the question.

"What do you mean?" inquired Unorna, with sudden coldness.

"Oh, nothing so serious as you seem to think. I was only wondering
whether a suggestion of reciprocation might not have been wise."

She faced him fiercely.

"Hold your peace, Keyork Arabian!" she cried.

"Why?" he asked with a bland smile, swinging his little legs and
stroking his long beard.

"There is a limit! Must you for ever be trying to suggest, and trying
to guide me in everything I do? It is intolerable! I can hardly call my
soul my own!"

"Hardly, considering my recent acquisition of it," returned Keyork
calmly.

"That wretched jest is threadbare."

"A jest! Wretched? And threadbare, too? Poor Keyork! His wit is failing
at last."

He shook his head in mock melancholy over his supposed intellectual
dotage. Unorna turned away, this time with the determination to leave
him.

"I am sorry if I have offended you," he said, very meekly. "Was what I
said so very unpardonable?"

"If ignorance is unpardonable, as you always say, then your speech
is past forgiveness," said Unorna, relenting by force of habit, but
gathering her fur around her. "If you know anything of women--"

"Which I do not," observed the gnome in a low-toned interruption.

"Which you do not--you would know how much such love as you advise me to
manufacture by force of suggestion could be worth in a woman's eyes. You
would know that a woman will be loved for herself, for her beauty, for
her wit, for her virtues, for her faults, for her own love, if you will,
and by a man conscious of all his actions and free of his heart; not by
a mere patient reduced to the proper state of sentiment by a trick of
hypnotism, or psychiatry, or of whatever you choose to call the effect
of this power of mine which neither you, nor I, nor any one can explain.
I will be loved freely, for myself, or not at all."

"I see, I see," said Keyork thoughtfully, "something in the way Israel
Kafka loves you."

"Yes, as Israel Kafka loves me, I am not afraid to say it. As he loves
me, of his own free will, and to his own destruction--a