ed no more color than a water-lily.

"I thought," she whispered, just audibly. "I thought you--would say,
good-bye!"

"I know," I stammered. "But I could not. That way was impossible for
us."

She did not contradict me. She was so very small, I saw, that her head
would reach no higher than where the bright spot had rested above my
heart when I had last stood at the Barrier. One hand gripped the veils
beneath her chin, and seemed the clenched fist of a child.

The crash of my door had startled the household. I had heard Phillida
cry out, and Vere's running steps upon the gravel path. Now he came
springing up the stairs. At the head of the flight he stopped, staring
at us.

"Desire," I spoke as naturally as I could manage, "this is Mr. Vere.
Vere, my fiancee, Miss Michell. Shall we go down to Phillida?"

And Desire Michell did not deny my claim.

I am not very sure of how we found ourselves downstairs. Nor do I
remember in what words we made the two girls known to one another.
Presently we were all in the living room, and Phillida had possession of
Desire Michell while Vere and I looked on stupidly at the proceedings.

Phil had placed her in a chair beside a tall floor-lamp and gently drew
off the draperies that hooded her. With little murmurs of compassion,
she unbound and shook free her guest's hair.

"My dear, you are all damp! This awful fog! You must have been out a
long time? You shall drink some tea before we start. Drawls, will you
light the alcohol lamp on the tea-table? The kettle is filled."

Now I could understand how Desire had appeared amid a drift of fireshot
smoke in the beam of my electric torch, the night before. Her hair was a
garment of flame-bright silk flowing around her, curling and eddying in
rich abundance. Over this she had worn the gray veils to smother all
that color and sheen into neutral sameness with night and shadows. No
wonder her face had seemed wraith-like when her startled shrinking away
from the light had set all that drapery billowing about her.

She was the voice that had been my intimate comrade through weeks of
strange adventure. She was the woman of the faded, yellow book, and the
painted beauty at the Metropolitan. She was all the Desires of whom I
had ever dreamed; and she was none of them, for she was herself. Her
long dark eyes, suddenly lifted to me, were individual by that ancestral
blending of drowsiness with watchfulness; yet were akin to the eyes of
youth in