ay without a lingering look.... Often
and often such dreams, to her anger and confusion, had haunted her,
even before she was married; and she had been alternately humiliated
and fascinated by them. Years ago she had told Ian Stafford of one of
the dreams of a past life--that she was a slave in Athens who saved her
people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her sing to him, in a
voice quite in keeping with her personality, delicate and fine and
wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its quality, with trills
like a lark--a little meretricious but captivating. He had also written
for her two verses which were as sharp and clear in her mind as the
letter he wrote when she had thrown him over so dishonourably:

"Your voice I knew, its cadences and trill;
It stilled the tumult and the overthrow
When Athens trembled to the people's will;
I knew it--'twas a thousand years ago.

"I see the fountains, and the gardens where
You sang the fury from the Satrap's brow;
I feel the quiver of the raptured air
I heard you in the Athenian grove--I hear you now."

As the words flashed into her mind now she looked at her husband
steadfastly. Were there, then, some unexplored regions in his nature,
where things dwelt, of which she had no glimmering of knowledge? Did he
understand more of women than she thought? Could she then really talk
to him of a thousand things of the mind which she had ever ruled out of
any commerce between them, one half of her being never opened up to his
sight? Not that he was deficient in intellect, but, to her thought, his
was a purely objective mind; or was it objective because it had not
been trained or developed subjectively? Had she ever really tried to
find a region in his big nature where the fine allusiveness and
subjectivity of the human mind could have free life and untrammelled
exercise, could gambol in green fields of imagination and adventure
upon strange seas of discovery? A shiver of pain, of remorse, went
through her frame now, as he held her at arm's length and looked at
her.... Had she started right? Had she ever given their natures a
chance to discover each other? Warmth and passion and youth and
excitement and variety--oh, infinite variety there had been!--but had
the start been a fair one, had she, with a whole mind and a full soul
of desire, gone to him first and last? What had been the governing
influence in their marriage where she was concerned?

Three yea