l significance. He thought that if she only could talk to him
in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer
beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling.

"But," she went on, "the name stuck in my head, it seems; and when you
mentioned it--"

"It broke the spell," muttered Heyst in angry disappointment as if he
had been deceived in some hope.

The girl, from her position a little above him, surveyed with still
eyes the abstracted silence of the man on whom she now depended with
a completeness of which she had not been vividly conscious before,
because, till then, she had never felt herself swinging between the
abysses of earth and heaven in the hollow of his arm. What if he should
grow weary of the burden?

"And, moreover, nobody had ever believed that tale!"

Heyst came out with an abrupt burst of sound which made her open her
steady eyes wider, with an effect of immense surprise. It was a purely
mechanical effect, because she was neither surprised nor puzzled. In
fact, she could understand him better then than at any moment since she
first set eyes on him.

He laughed scornfully.

"What am I thinking of?" he cried. "As if it could matter to me what
anybody had ever said or believed, from the beginning of the world till
the crack of doom!"

"I never heard you laugh till today," she observed. "This is the second
time!"

He scrambled to his feet and towered above her.

"That's because, when one's heart has been broken into in the way you
have broken into mine, all sorts of weaknesses are free to enter--shame,
anger, stupid indignation, stupid fears--stupid laughter, too. I wonder
what interpretation you are putting on it?"

"It wasn't gay, certainly," she said. "But why are you angry with me?
Are you sorry you took me away from those beasts? I told you who I was.
You could see it."

"Heavens!" he muttered. He had regained his command of himself. "I
assure you I could see much more than you could tell me. I could see
quite a lot that you don't even suspect yet, but you can't be seen quite
through."

He sank to the ground by her side and took her hand. She asked gently:

"What more do you want from me?"

He made no sound for a time.

"The impossible, I suppose," he said very low, as one makes a
confidence, and pressing the hand he grasped.

It did not return the pressure. He shook his head as if to drive away
the thought of this, and added in a louder,