ver the top of his book.
This person was a woman, and her eyes traveled from object to object
with a curiosity tinged with that incertitude which attacks us all when
we enter an unfamiliar room. She was dressed in black, showing the
white arms and neck. Her hair was like ripe wheat after a rain-storm:
oh, but he knew well the color of her eyes, blue as the Adriatic. She
was a woman of perhaps thirty, matured, graceful, handsome. The sight
of her excited a thrill in his veins, deny it how he would.

She scanned the long rows of books, the strange weapons, the heroic and
sinister flags, the cases of butterflies. With each inspection she
stepped nearer and nearer, till by reaching out his hand he might have
touched her. Quietly he rose. It was a critical moment.

She was startled. She had thought she was alone.

"Pardon me," she said, in a low, musical voice; "I did not know that
any one was here." And then she saw his face. Her own blanched and
her hands went to her heart. "Karl?"

CHAPTER XIV

THE DRAMA BEGINS

She swayed a little, but recovered as the pain of the shock was
succeeded by numbness. That out of the dark of this room, into the
light of that lamp, in this house so far removed from cities that it
seemed not a part of the world . . . there should step this man! Why
had there been no hint of his presence? Why had not the clairvoyance
of despair warned her? One of her hands rose and pressed over her
eyes, as if to sponge out this phantom. It was useless; it was no
dream; he was still there, this man she had neither seen nor heard of
for five years because her will was stronger than her desire, this man
who had broken her heart as children break toys! And deep below all
this present terror was the abiding truth that she still loved him and
always would love him. The shame of this knowledge did more than all
else to rouse and to nerve her.

"Karl?" It was like an echo.

"Yes." There was war in his voice and attitude and not without reason.
He had wronged this woman, not with direct intention it was true, but
nevertheless he had wronged her; and her presence here could mean
nothing less than that fate had selected this spot for the reckoning.
She could topple down his carefully reared schemes with the same ease
with which he had blown over hers. And to him these schemes were life
to his breath and salt to his blood, everything. What was one woman?
cynically. "Yes, it is I," in