hings which might be either exquisite or frightful. She
stood horrified by this thought. The familiar world seemed to be
dissolving in a mist, just as in her childhood: and through the mist
she perceived immense, vague apparitions, at once monstrous and
beautiful.

"Ah! why must these things come to me? What crime have I ever
committed?"

The huge, invisible cat was resuming its play with the mouse.

"Yes," she thought, "the capacity for pleasure is balanced by the
capacity for suffering. The more subtle our happy sensations, the more
piercing our painful ones. Yet the thrill from pleasure is gradually
deadened by repetition, and finally, with the passage of time, the
senses no longer feel it; but all the while that pleasure is
diminishing, pain increases. After all, what a tragical farce! Is
there nothing else, nothing better?"

Lilla began again to shrink from life, to mistrust it.

She suffered from trivial, groundless fears, which she magnified, then
abruptly forgot. Growing thinner, she found herself enervated as in
the days of her mourning for Lawrence Teck, and all the while something
at once indefinite and priceless seemed to be lost to her. In the
midst of her sadness she would have fleeting perceptions of blue water,
felucca sails, a town on the edge of a lake--maybe Lausanne--a room
where she sat obediently asleep in a deep leather chair.

Now and again she woke in the morning with dim impressions of having
dreamed a dream of inexpressible grandeur, of supernatural joy, in some
place that she could not remember, and with some person whose face she
could not recall. But as soon as she was wide awake all recollections
of the dream passed away. She found herself burdened with the same
unaccountable distress that she had taken to bed with her last night.

"All this preoccupation with myself! It must end to-day."

She determined to lose herself in David, to live and think and feel for
him alone.

CHAPTER XXXVII

In the forests of the Mambava, in groves of banana trees, the peaked,
thatched roofs of Muene-Motapa's stronghold rose in concentric circles
round the royal houses.

Here, all day long, one heard the bleating of goats and fat-tailed
sheep, the coo and whirr of pigeons, the thump of wooden mortars in
which the women, their nude bodies covered with intricate designs of
scars, were grinding millet. At times these noises were pierced by the
clatter of little hammers, with which