, from her point of view, the reverse of a dash for freedom.
In her clear, cold, limited mentality, equipped only with casual and
fragmentary tales told by the ignorant or the prejudiced products of
mid-European culture, England was the home of debased ideals and gloomy
prisons, of iron-hard creeds and a grasping cunning avarice. Her
mercenaries were devoted to the conquest and destruction of all that
made life beautiful and gay. Out of her cold wet fogs her legions came
to despoil the fair places of the earth. And his fidelity, his avowed
abandonment of the sentiments of the past, inspired her more with wonder
and delight than a reciprocal passion. For she was under no illusions as
to her own destiny. She, too, knew this would not last for ever. Her
quick mind took in all the fantastic possibilities of his plan, and she
perceived immediately the necessity of giving her consent. He must be
kept in this mood of exalted happiness. Intuitively she knew that she
herself fed on that mood, in which he rose superior to the normal level
of his days. And in spite of her dismay at the mere thought of going out
again upon the sea, leaving everything she understood and loved, leaving
a land of whose spirit and atmosphere she was a part, she asked him when
he wanted to go.

"Not yet," he replied, still gazing at the ground, and she looked at him
with amazement. She could hardly repress an exclamation at his
credulity. He actually believed she would go.

"And we will take all our money?" she suggested.

"Yes, of course," he agreed absently. It was part of his happiness to
put everything in her hands. There was for him a supremely sensuous
delight in the words, "It is all for you. Take it. Without you, it is of
no use to me." He was unable to imagine a more complete surrender, nor
could he believe that a woman would accept it save at the price of
integrity. Evanthia was like that. Money was never her preoccupation,
but she never forgot it. She had none of the futilities of
book-education filling her mind like dusty and useless furniture, so
that her consciousness of money was as clear and sharp as her
consciousness of food or pain. And a sudden perception of his faith in
her, his profound absorption in his own romantic illusions, struck her
to a puzzled silence, which he took for assent and sympathy. She looked
away from him and out across the sea. It was too easy.

"Evanthia," he whispered, and she turned her full, direct untroubl