haps in consequence of the old Phoenician
occupation--the moon. At certain periods of the year their forests
thundered with the music of drums; their towns were deserted except for
the women and children. Then the stranger who had ventured into their
country might see, from his hiding place, hordes of black men moving to
a secret rendezvous, their painted faces framed in monkey hair, their
limbs covered with amulets, their shields rising in time to an
interminable chanting in a minor key.

Sometimes, in the corridor outside the door of Lawrence's rooms, she
encountered a small, dapper young man with an inquisitive face, who
lived on the floor above. He usually carried under his arm a leather
portfolio. Nothing could have been more interested than his look when
he passed this sad-eyed woman in mourning, whose identity and story he
had learned from the janitor.

When she had shut the living-room door behind her, for a moment she
closed her eyes in order that she might not see the weapons on the
walls. Then she kindled the fire. The blazing logs sent over her a
wave of heat; but she shivered while listening to the sound of sleet on
the glass.

"He might be here with me. We might have felt together the security
and peace of this warm room, and laughed at the storm outside."

One evening she ripped from their frames the photographs of savages
smeared with white paint and crowned with fur and feathers. She threw
them into the fire. As the flames consumed them, she leaned, forward
like those who try to annihilate their enemies by destroying their
likenesses.

For a long while she sat beside the empty chair, shading her eyes from
the blaze with a translucent hand. But suddenly she stood up, tense
and quaking. Her dilated eyes were fixed upon a point in space, from
which an overwhelming impression had rushed in upon her--a flood of
distant emotion, a sort of voiceless cry, in a flash traversing half
the earth and unerringly reaching her.

Little by little her nerves and muscles relaxed. Moving as though her
limbs were weighted with lead, after carefully drawing the fire screen
in front of the glowing embers, she put on her black toque, her long
coat of black fur and her black gloves.

As she crossed the sidewalk to her car, an eddy of wind raised up
before her, head high, a whirl of snowflakes that resembled a wraith
for one moment, before it was whipped away into the darkness.

PART TWO

CHAPTER