I took my eyes from her face and became aware that dusk was beginning to steal into the room. How strange it seemed. Except for the glazed rotunda part its long walls, divided into narrow panels separated by an order of flat pilasters, presented, depicted on a black background and in vivid colours, slender women with butterfly wings and lean youths with narrow birds’ wings. The effect was supposed to be Pompeiian and Rita and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of some enriched shopkeeper. But still it was a display of fancy, a sign of grace; but at that moment these figures appeared to me weird and intrusive and strangely alive in their attenuated grace of unearthly beings concealing a power to see and hear.

Without words, without gestures, Dona Rita was heard again. “It may have been as near coming to pass as this.” She showed me the breadth of her little finger nail. “Yes, as near as that. Why? How? Just like that, for nothing. Because it had come up. Because a wild notion had entered a practical old woman’s head. Yes. And the best of it is that I have nothing to complain of. Had I surrendered I would have been perfectly safe with these two. It is they or rather he who couldn’t trust me, or rather that something which I express, which I stand for. Mills would never tell me what it was. Perhaps he didn’t know exactly himself. He said it was something like genius. My genius! Oh, I am not conscious of it, believe me, I am not conscious of it. But if I were I wouldn’t pluck it out and cast it away. I am ashamed of nothing, of nothing! Don’t be stupid enough to think that I have the slightest regret. There is no regret. First of all because I am I— and then because . . . My dear, believe me, I have had a horrible time of it myself lately.”

This seemed to be the last word. Outwardly quiet, all the time, it was only then that she became composed enough to light an enormous cigarette of the same pattern as those made specially for the king — por el Rey! After a time, tipping the ash into the bowl on her left hand, she asked me in a friendly, almost tender, tone:

“What are you thinking of, amigo?”

“I was thinking of your immense generosity. You want to give a crown to one man, a fortune to another. That is very fine. But I suppose there is a limit to your generosity somewhere.”

“I don’t see why there should be any limit — to fine intentions! Yes, one would like to pay ransom and be done with it all.”

“That’s the feeling of a captive; and yet somehow I can’t think of you as ever having been anybody’s captive.”

“You do display some wonderful insight sometimes. My dear, I begin to suspect that men are rather conceited about their powers. They think they dominate us. Even exceptional men will think that; men too great for mere vanity, men like Henry Allegre for instance, who by his consistent and serene detachment was certainly fit to dominate all sorts of people. Yet for the most part they can only do it because women choose more or less consciously to let them do so. Henry Allegre, if any man, might have been certain of his own power; and yet, look: I was a chit of a girl, I was sitting with a book where I had no business to be, in his own garden, when he suddenly came upon me, an ignorant girl of seventeen, a most uninviting creature with a tousled head, in an old black frock and shabby boots. I could have run away. I was perfectly capable of it. But I stayed looking up at him and — in the end it was HE who went away and it was I who stayed.”

“Consciously?” I murmured.

“Consciously? You may just as well ask my shadow that lay so still by me on the young grass in that morning sunshine. I never knew before how still I could keep. It wasn’t the stillness of terror. I remained, knowing perfectly well that if I ran he was not the man to run after me. I remember perfectly his deep-toned, politely indifferent ‘Restez donc.’ He was mistaken. Already then I hadn’t the slightest intention to move. And if you ask me again how far conscious all this was the nearest answer I can make you is this: that I remained on purpose, but I didn’t know for what purpose I remained. Really, that couldn’t be expected. . . . Why do you sigh like this? Would you have preferred me to be idiotically innocent or abominably wise?”

“These are not the questions that trouble me,” I said. “If I sighed it is because I am weary.”

“And getting stiff, too, I should say, in this Pompeiian armchair. You had better get out of it and sit on this couch as you always used to do. That, at any rate, is not Pompeiian. You have been growing of late extremely formal, I don’t know why. If it is a pose then for goodness’ sake drop it. Are you going to model yourself on Captain Blunt? You couldn’t, you know. You are too young.”

“I don’t want to model myself on anybody,” I said. “And anyway Blunt is too romantic; and, moreover, he has been and is yet in love with you — a thing that requires some style, an attitude, something of which I am altogether incapable.”

“You know it isn’t so stupid, this what you have just said. Yes, there is something in this.”

“I am not stupid,” I protested, without much heat.

“Oh, yes, you are. You don’t know the world enough to judge. You don’t know how wise men can be. Owls are nothing to them. Why do you try to look like an owl? There are thousands and thousands of them waiting for me outside the door: the staring, hissing beasts. You don’t know what a relief of mental ease and intimacy you have been to me in the frankness of gestures and speeches and thoughts, sane or insane, that we have been throwing at each other. I have known nothing of this in my life but with you. There had always been some fear, some constraint, lurking in the background behind everybody, everybody — except you, my friend.”

“An unmannerly, Arcadian state of affairs. I am glad you like it. Perhaps it’s because you were intelligent enough to perceive that I was not in love with you in any sort of style.”

“No, you were always your own self, unwise and reckless and with something in it kindred to mine, if I may say so without offence.”

“You may say anything without offence. But has it never occurred to your sagacity that I just, simply, loved you?”

“Just — simply,” she repeated in a wistful tone.

“You didn’t want to trouble your head about it, is that it?”

“My poor head. From your tone one might think you yearned to cut it off. No, my dear, I have made up my mind not to lose my head.”

“You would be astonished to know how little I care for your mind.”

“Would I? Come and sit on the couch all the same,” she said after a moment of hesitation. Then, as I did not move at once, she added with indifference: “You may sit as far away as you like, it’s big enough, goodness knows.”

The light was ebbing slowly out of the rotunda and to my bodily eyes she was beginning to grow shadowy. I sat down on the couch and for a long time no word passed between us. We made no movement. We did not even turn towards each other. All I was conscious of was the softness of the seat which seemed somehow to cause a relaxation of my stern mood, I won’t say against my will but without any will on my part. Another thing I was conscious of, strangely enough, was the enormous brass bowl for cigarette ends. Quietly, with the least possible action, Dona Rita moved it to the other side of her motionless person. Slowly, the fantastic women with butterflies’ wings and the slender-limbed youths with the gorgeous pinions on their shoulders were vanishing into their black backgrounds with an effect of silent discretion, leaving us to ourselves.

I felt suddenly extremely exhausted, absolutely overcome with fatigue since I had moved; as if to sit on that Pompeiian chair had been a task almost beyond human strength, a sort of labour that must end in collapse. I fought against it for a moment and then my resistance gave way. Not all at once but as if yielding to an irresistible pressure (for I was not conscious of any irresistible attraction) I found myself with my head resting, with a weight I felt must be crushing, on Dona Rita’s shoulder which yet did not give way, did not flinch at all. A faint scent of violets filled the tragic emptiness of my head and it seemed impossible to me that I should not cry from sheer weakness. But I remained dry-eyed. I only felt myself slipping lower and lower and I caught her round the waist clinging to her not from any intention but purely by instinct. All that time she hadn’t stirred. There was only the slight movement of her breathing that showed her to be alive; and with closed eyes I imagined her to be lost in thought, removed by an incredible meditation while I clung to her, to an immense distance from the earth. The distance must have been immense because the silence was so perfect, the feeling as if of eternal stillness. I had a distinct impression of being in contact with an infinity that had the slightest possible rise and fall, was pervaded by a warm, delicate scent of violets and through which came a hand from somewhere to rest lightly on my head. Presently my ear caught the faint and regular pulsation of her heart, firm and quick, infinitely touching in its persistent mystery, disclosing itself into my very ear — and my felicity became complete.

It was a dreamlike state combined with a dreamlike sense of insecurity. Then in that warm and scented infinity, or eternity, in which I rested lost in bliss but ready for any catastrophe, I heard the distant, hardly audible, and fit to strike terror into the heart, ringing of a bell. At this sound the greatness of spaces departed. I felt the world close about me; the world of darkened walls, of very deep grey dusk against the panes, and I asked in a pained voice:

“Why did you ring, Rita?”

There was a bell rope within reach of her hand. I had not felt her move, but she said very low:

“I rang for the lights.”

“You didn’t want the lights.”

“It was time,” she whispered secretly.

Somewhere within the house a door slammed. I got away from her feeling small and weak as if the best part of me had been torn away and irretrievably lost. Rose must have been somewhere near the door.

“It’s abominable,” I murmured to the still, idol-like shadow on the couch.

The answer was a hurried, nervous whisper: “I tell you it was time. I rang because I had no strength to push you away.”

I suffered a moment of giddiness before the door opened, light streamed in, and Rose entered, preceding a man in a green baize apron whom I had never seen, carrying on an enormous tray three Argand lamps fitted into vases of Pompeiian form. Rose distributed them over the room. In the flood of soft light the winged youths and the butterfly women reappeared on the panels, affected, gorgeous, callously unconscious of anything having happened during their absence. Rose attended to the lamp on the nearest mantelpiece, then turned about and asked in a confident undertone.

“Monsieur dine?”

I had lost myself with my elbows on my knees and my head in my hands, but I heard the words distinctly. I heard also the silence which ensued. I sat up and took the responsibility of the answer on myself.

“Impossible. I am going to sea this evening.”

This was perfectly true only I had totally forgotten it till then. For the last two days my being was no longer composed of memories but exclusively of sensations of the most absorbing, disturbing, exhausting nature. I was like a man who has been buffeted by the sea or by a mob till he loses all hold on the world in the misery of his helplessness. But now I was recovering. And naturally the first thing I remembered was the fact that I was going to sea.

“You have heard, Rose,” Dona Rita said at last with some impatience.

The girl waited a moment longer before she said:

“Oh, yes! There is a man waiting for Monsieur in the hall. A seaman.”

It could be no one but Dominic. It dawned upon me that since the evening of our return I had not been near him or the ship, which was completely unusual, unheard of, and well calculated to startle Dominic.

“I have seen him before,” continued Rose, “and as he told me he has been pursuing Monsieur all the afternoon and didn’t like to go away without seeing Monsieur for a moment, I proposed to him to wait in the hall till Monsieur was at liberty.”

I said: “Very well,” and with a sudden ............