on!" I broke in.

Carquinez looked at me pityingly, and his voice was like a funeral bell.

"They lost. They supremely, colossally lost."

"But the world believes otherwise," I ventured coldly.

"The world conjectures. The world sees only the face of things. But I
know. Has it ever entered your mind to wonder why she took the veil,
buried herself in that dolorous convent of the living dead?"

"Because she loved him so, and when he died..."

Speech was frozen on my lips by Carquinez's sneer.

"A pat answer," he said, "machine-made like a piece of cotton-drill. The
world's judgment! And much the world knows about it. Like you, she fled
from life. She was beaten. She flung out the white flag of fatigue. And
no beleaguered city ever flew that flag in such bitterness and tears.

"Now I shall tell you the whole tale, and you must believe me, for I
know. They had pondered the problem of satiety. They loved Love. They
knew to the uttermost farthing the value of Love. They loved him so
well that they were fain to keep him always, warm and a-thrill in their
hearts. They welcomed his coming; they feared to have him depart.

"Love was desire, they held, a delicious pain. He was ever seeking
easement, and when he found that for which he sought, he died. Love
denied was Love alive; Love granted was Love deceased. Do you follow me?
They saw it was not the way of life to be hungry for what it has. To eat
and still be hungry--man has never accomplished that feat. The problem
of satiety. That is it. To have and to keep the sharp famine-edge of
appetite at the groaning board. This was their problem, for they loved
Love. Often did they discuss it, with all Love's sweet ardours brimming
in their eyes; his ruddy blood spraying their cheeks; his voice playing
in and out with their voices, now hiding as a tremolo in their throats,
and again shading a tone with that ineffable tenderness which he alone
can utter.

"How do I know all this? I saw--much. More I learned from her diary.
This I found in it, from Fiona Macleod: 'For, truly, that wandering
voice, that twilight-whisper, that breath so dewy-sweet, that
flame-winged lute-player whom none sees but for a moment, in a
rainbow-shimmer of joy, or a sudden lightning-flare of passion, this
exquisite mystery we call Amor, comes, to some rapt visionaries at
least, not with a song upon the lips that all may hear, or with blithe
viol of public music, but as one wrought by ecstasy, dumbly el