ing against her knee, and still gazed unmoved. . . . Then I
knew why. She had passed beyond these vain phenomena. Her eyes saw
them and saw them not. . . . She was dying.

"Yet she sat erect. She even smiled, very faintly, and made a feeble
motion of the hand towards her guitar-case, which I had lifted out of
the reach of the blood and set on the seat at a little distance from
her. Then I understood that she _had_ seen, after all. . . . For I
must tell you that, in the early days, Santa's playing and singing
had brought great cheer to the crews, and our boat was envied for
carrying this music. But there had come a day when Jarvis and Prout
sent aft very respectfully to beg that there might be no more of it,
for it dragged across their raw nerves: and from that hour the guitar
had lain in its case. It could be set free now.

"I took it out, and she half held out her arms for it, as a mother
might for her newly-born child. . . . But she would never play on it
again. The strings were all loose but one, and that one broken.
She had no strength, and I no skill, to re-tune the thing.

"But she thanked me in a sort of throaty whisper, and sat for a while
letting the neck of the guitar lie against her shoulder, while her
left hand went up to clasp it and finger it in the old way. And her
right hand lifted itself once or twice towards the sounding-hole, but
dropped back to her lap.

"'You are very good to me,' she said, after some seconds, still in
the same whisper. 'Why is it that you hate Pete so?' Then, as I did
not answer, she went on, 'I am dying, I think. It would be quite
safe to tell me, now.'

"'When two men love one woman--' I began. But she shook her head,
and her eyes accused me. Santa had very beautiful eyes, and in this
agony they were perhaps deeper in colour and more beautiful than
ever. But they had changed, somehow. . . . I cannot explain it but
they recalled another pair of eyes . . . another woman's. . . .
Whose? . . . I don't know! My mother's, maybe. She died, you know,
when I was quite a small boy. . . . Anyway, these eyes quite suddenly
looked at me out of the past--out of my memory, as it were.
They were Santa's and yet they were not Santa's. . . .

"'Ah,' said she, 'do not lie to me, now! It hurts so!'

"'Well, then,' I told her, 'your husband once, back in the past, did me
a very great wrong. It--well, it wrecked the work of my life, and I
have never forgiven it. Now let us t