tery, the charm that
surrounded her clung to her even when she appeared most womanly. To
the boy lover gazing with devouring eyes she seemed that night more
than a woman. He thought of the tales he had heard as a child from the
peasants on winter nights in his own country. Tales of the forests and
legends of the Hartz Mountains, of lonely places haunted by nixies and
wood maidens, fairy shapes with streaming hair and vaporous robes,
seeing which a man would become for ever after mad with longing, and
desire no mortal woman.

Arithelli's long limbs appeared nymphlike in her plain blue
high-waisted gown of Emile's choosing, that had no superfluous bow or
trimming, and left free her beauty of outline. She possessed no
jewellery now wherewith to deck herself, and there was no trace of
artificial red on face and lips.

The candles on the table flickered to and fro in the draught from the
open window and she shivered in the midst of some laughing speech and
glanced over her shoulder at the door behind her.

Vardri, reading her thoughts, said, "You're afraid of something, dear,
what is it?"

"Nothing, at least I thought someone was listening, was coming in. We
are always talking of spies till one gets absurdly nervous and imagines
all sorts of foolish things. I have never said so to anyone else, but
there is always the feeling of being watched. It is so difficult to
know who is for and who against us, and so easy to give evidence
without meaning to be a traitor. Just before I got ill, Sobrenski sent
me to a little newspaper shop down in the Parelelo quarter. I was to
ask if they sold '_Le Flambeau_.' The man looked at me hard and asked
if there was any connection between that journal and the one published
at number 27 Calle de Pescadores. The sun must have made me feel
stupid, and I answered _Yes_, without thinking. I had taken it for
granted that the man was one of us, and then I knew suddenly that he
wasn't."

Vardri bent forward across the table. "Did you tell anyone what you
had said?"

"Not Sobrenski; I told Emile. He looked me up and down, and said
something that I couldn't hear, and then, 'I thought you could hold
your tongue, Fatalite. It seems, after all, you are a woman and
can't!' and then he walked out of the room. Vardri, did you ever feel
as I do when you first began to work for the Cause? Perhaps one gets
used to it in the end and doesn't care."

"Yes," the boy answered between his tee