Now that she had gone from him, he realized how mistaken he had been in his chivalry. From the first, instead of begging, he ought to have commanded. She was a girl with whom it paid to be rough. It was only on the precipice, when he had seized her savagely, that her passion had responded. In the light of what had happened, her last words seemed a taunt—an echo of her childish despising of King Arthurs: “And you said I hadn’t any passion I—You’re good, Meester Deek.” Had he been less honorable in her hour of weakness, he would still have had her.

“That ends it!” he told himself. Nevertheless he set out hot-footed for Arles. There he hunted up the cocher who had driven them to Les Baux, and learnt that she had taken train for Paris. In Paris he inquired at The Oxford and Cambridge. He searched the registers of a dozen hotels. Tramping the boulevards of the city of lovers, he revisited all the places where they had been together; he hoped that a whim of sentiment might lead her on the same errand.

A new thought struck him: she had written to Eden Row and his mother didn’t know his address. All the time that he had been wasting in this intolerable aloneness her explanation had been waiting for him. He returned posthaste, only to be met with her unconquerable silence. He hurried to Orchid Lodge; her father might know her whereabouts. There he was told that Hal had sailed for New York—with what motive he could guess. This lent the final derisive touch to his tragedy.

It was the end of July, nearly a year to the day since he had made his great discovery at Glastonbury. He had spent a month of torture. Since the key had turned in her lock at the H么tel de la Reine Jeanne, he had had no sign of her. He came down to breakfast one sunshiny morning; lying beside his plate was a letter in her hand. He slipped it into his pocket with feigned carelessness, till he should be alone; then he opened it and read:

Dearest Teddy:

I need you.

Savoy Hotel,

The Strand.

Come at once.

Your foolish Desire.

She needed him! It was the first time she had owned as much. From her that admission in three words was more eloquent than many pages. Had her slavery to freedom become irksome? Had it got her into trouble?

He reached the Savoy within the hour. As he passed his card across the desk he was a-tremble. It was a relief when the clerk gave him no bad news but, having phoned up, turned and said, “The lady will see you in her room, sir.”

The passage outside her door was piled with trunks; painted on them, like an advertisement, in conspicuous white letters, was Janice Audrey. He tapped. As he waited he heard laughter. In his high-wrought state of nerves the sound was an offense.

The handle turned. “Hulloa, Teddy! I’ve heard about you. I’m going to leave you two scatter-brains to yourselves.”

Fluffy was in her street-attire—young, eager and caparisoned for conquest. She seemed entirely unrelated to the shuddering Diana in the Tyrolese huntsman’s costume, whom he had last seen breaking her heart in the dressing-room of The Belshazzar. He stepped aside to let her pass; then he entered.

He found himself in a large sunlit room in a riot of disorder—whether with packing or unpacking it was difficult to tell. Evidently some one had gone through a storm of shopping. Frocks were strewn in every direction; opera-cloaks and evening-gowns lay on the floor, on the bed, on the backs of chairs. Hats were half out of milliners’ boxes. Shoes and slippers lay jumbled in a pile in a suit-case. It was fitting that he and Desire should meet again in a hired privacy, like transients.

She stood against a wide window, looking down on the Embankment She was wearing a soft green peignoir trimmed with daisies. It was almost transparent, so that in the strong sunlight her slight figure showed through it It was low-cut and clinging—a match in color to the Guinevere costume which she had been wearing when he had discovered her at Glastonbury. Had she intended that it should waken memories? As he watched he was certain that that had been her intention, for she was adorned with another reminder: a false curl had usurped the place of the old one she had given him. It danced against her neck, quivering with excitement, and seemed to beckon.

Her back was towards him. She must have heard Fluffy speaking to him. She must know that he was on the threshold. He closed the door quietly and halted.

“Meester Deek, are you glad to see me?” She spoke without turning.

Her question went unanswered. In the silence it seemed to repeat itself maddeningly. She drummed with her fingers on the pane, as though insisting that until he had answered he should not see her face.

At last her patience gave out She glanced across her shoulder. Something in his expression warned her. Running to him, she caught his hands and pressed against him, laughing into his eyes. She waited submissively for his arms to enfold her. When he remained unmoved, she whispered luringly, “I’m as amiable as I ever shall be.”

“Are you?”

She pouted. “Once if I’d told you that——

“Are you!”

“Is that all after a whole month?”

“A whole month!” His face seemed set in a mask. “To me it has seemed a century.”

For the first time she dimly realized what he had suffered. She drew her fingers across his cheek. Her hands ran over him like white mice. The weariness in his way of talking frightened her. “I’m—I’m sorry that I’m not always nice. It wasn’t quite nice of me to leave you, was it?”

His lips grew crooked at her understatement “From my point of view it wasn’t.”

She thought for a moment; she was determined not to acknowledge that he was altered. Slipping her arm into his comfortably, she led him across the room. “Let’s sit down. I’ve so much to tell you.”

He helped her to push a couch to the window that they might shut out the sight of the room’s disorder. When she had seated herself in a corner, she patted the place beside her. He sat himself at the other end and gazed out at the gray-gold stretch of river, where steamers churned back and forth between Greenwich and Westminster.

“Fluffy’s going to America; we ran over from Paris to get some clothes. It’s all rubbish to get one’s clothes in Paris; London’s just as good and not one-half as expensive. She has to return to Paris in a day or two to see a play. Simon Freelevy thinks it will suit her. After that she sails from Cherbourg.—Meester Deek, are you interested in Fluffy’s doings?”

“I was looking at the river. I scarcely heard what you were saying.”

“Well, then, perhaps this will interest you. She says that, if I like, she’ll see that I get a place in her company at The Belshassar.—Still admiring the view?—I wish you’d answer me sometimes, Teddy.”

“So you’re going to become another Fluffy?”

Her tone sank to a honeyed sweetness. “You’re most awfully far away. If you don’t come nearer, we might just as well——”

“As I came along the passage,” he said, “I heard you laughing. I haven’t done much laughing lately.”

A frown crept into her eyes. “That was because I was going to see you.”

He wished he could believe her.

In a desperate effort to win him to pleasantness, she closed up the space that separated them. His coldness piqued her. Through her filmy garment her body touched him; it was burning. “And I—I haven’t done much laughing lately, either; but one can’t be always tragic.” Her voice was tremulous and sultry. She brushed against him and peered into his face reproachfully. “You aren’t very sympathetic.”

“Not very.”

She tried the effect of irritation. “I wish you wouldn’t keep on catching at what I say.” Then, with a return to her sweetness: “Do be kind, Meester Deck. You don’t know how badly I need you.”

Something deep and emotional stirred within him. Perhaps it was memory—perhaps habit All his life he had been waiting for just that—for her to need him; it had begun years ago when Hal had told him of the price that she would have to pay. Perhaps it was love struggling in the prison that her indifference had created for it It might be merely the sex response to her closeness.

“I came because you wrote that you needed me. But your laughing and the way you met me——”

“I was nervous and—and you don’t know why.”

He shook his head. “After all that’s happened, after all the loneliness and all the silence—— My dear, I don’t know what’s the matter with me; I think you’ve killed something. I’m not trying to be unkind.”

She crouched her face in her hands. At last she became earnest “And just when I need you!”

“Tell me,” he urged gravely; “I’ll do anything.”

“You promise—really anything?”

“Anything.”

She smiled mysteriously, making bars of her fingers before her eyes. She knew that, however he might deny it, he was again surrendering to her power. “Even if I were to ask you to marry me?”

“Anything,” he repeated, without fervor.

“Then I’ll ask a little thing first.” She hesitated. “It would help if you put your arm about me.”

He carried out her request perfunctorily.

“Ask me questions,” she whispered; “it will be easier to begin like that.”

“Where did you go when you left me?”

“To Paris.”

“I know. I followed you.”

She started. “But you didn’t see me?”

He kept her in suspense, while he groped after the reason for her excitement. “No. I didn’t see you. Whom were you with?”

“Fluffy.”

“Any one else?”

“Yes.” She caught at his hands, as though already he had made a sign to leave her. “I didn’t know he was to be there.”

“Ah!” He knew whom she meant: the man with whom she had flirted in California and whom a strange chance had led to her hotel in Paris. He would have withdrawn his arm if she had not held it.

“But none of this explains your leaving me and then not writing.”

A hardness had crept into his tones. His jealousy had sprung into a flame. He remembered those photographs of Tom in her bedroom. There had always been other men at the back of her life. How did he know whom she met or what she did, when he was away from her?

“Meester Deek,” she clutched at him, “don’t You—you frighten me. I’ve done nothing wrong. I haven’t I’ve spent every moment with Fluffy.”

“That didn’t keep you from writing.”

“No.” She laid her face against his pleadingly. “That didn’t prevent It was—— Oh, Meester Deek, won’t you understand—you’ve always been so unjudging? At Les Baux that night you wakened something—something that I’d never felt. I didn’t dare to trust myself. It wasn’t you that I distrusted. I wanted to go somewhere alone—somewhere where I could think and come to myself. If I’d written to you, or received letters from you——”

“Desire, let’s speak the truth. We promised always to be honest You say you went with Fluffy to be alone; you know you didn’t. Fluffy’s never alone—she’s a queen bee with the drones always buzzing round her. You went away to get rid of me, and for the fun of seeing whether you could recall me.”

“Not that. Truly not that” She paused and drew a long breath, like a diver getting ready for a deep plunge. “It was because I was afraid that, if I stopped longer, we might have to marry. A girl may be cold—she mayn’t even love a man, but if she trifles too long with his affections, she herself sometimes catches fire. That was how my mother—with my father.&rdqu............