ries, in the Appian Way of
pleasure it is a sunrise moment. Actual time has nothing to do with the
clock."

She looked up to the little gold-lacquered clock on the mantel-piece.
"See, it is going to strike," she said. As she spoke, the little silver
hammer softly struck. "That is the clock-time, but what time is it
really--for you, for instance?"

"In Elysium there is no time," he murmured with a gallantry so
intentionally obvious and artificial that her pulses beat with anger.

"It is wonderful, then, how you managed the dinner-hour so exactly. You
did not miss it by a fraction."

"It is only when you enter Elysium that there is no time. It was eight
o'clock when I arrived--by the world's time. Since then I have been
dead to time--and the world."

"You do not suggest that you are in heaven?" she asked, ironically.

"Nothing so extreme as that. All extremes are violent."

"Ah, the middle place--then you are in purgatory?"

"But what should you be doing in purgatory? Or have you only come with
a drop of water to cool the tongue of Dives?" His voice trailed along
so coolly that it incensed her further.

"Certainly Dives' tongue is blistering," she said with great effort to
still the raging tumult within her. "Yet I would not cool it if I
could."

Suddenly the anger seemed to die out of her, and she looked at him as
she did in the days before Rudyard Byng came across her path--eagerly,
childishly, eloquently, inquiringly. He was the one man who satisfied
the intellectual and temperamental side of her; and he had taught her
more than any one else in the world. She realized that she had "Tossed
him violently like a ball into a far country," and that she had not now
a vestige of power over him--either of his senses or his mind; that he
was master of the situation. But was it so that there was a man whose
senses could not be touched when all else failed? She was very woman,
eager for the power which she had lost, and power was hard to get--by
what devious ways had she travelled to find it!

As they leaned over a book of coloured prints of Gainsborough, Romney,
and Vandyke, her soft, warm breast touched his arm and shoulder, a
strand of her cobweb, golden hair swept his cheek, and a sigh came from
her lips, so like those of that lass who caught and held her Nelson to
the end, and died at last in poverty, friendless, homeless, and alone.
Did he fancy that he heard a word breathing through her sigh--his name,
Ian? F