,
with chairs of good line. Here was a big piano, here a fireplace, here a
few paintings, colorful landscapes, on the wall. Together they lit
candles.

"Back of here is a garden," she said, "where I spend most of the day.
And I have a cook"--she smiled--"and a maid who waits on me. And yet I
go out to walk on the Prado...."

Shane wasn't surprised. It wasn't home, somehow. The room was like a
setting in a play, here light, here shadow.... The paintings, the
instrument of music, the chairs, they were not things owned and loved.
They were properties.... In the golden candle-light, as she moved, she
was like an actress of great restraint. Every step, posture, gesture
seemed to have an occult significance. Even her bedroom, away off
somewhere, he felt, was not a place where one slept easily and dreamed.
It would be like the dressing-room of some woman mummer.... It was all
like a play, of which he was seeing a fragment from the wings.... What
was it all about? Who was she? And why was his heart a-flutter?

She had taken off her hat, and her hair was coiled close about her
exquisite head. White and black, regular, significant, antique--like a
cameo of some Greek woman, long dead. She stood by a little table, one
hand on it, the other like some butterfly against her gown.... It was
like a pose--but unconscious, he knew, utterly unconscious....

"Tell me," she said, "why did you speak to me?"

"I don't know," he said, "I just spoke."

"You weren't"--her words were weighty, picked--"looking for a flirtation
with a pretty woman?"

"Why, no. Of course not," he answered. "I never thought--"

"No. No, you didn't." She decided for herself.

She came toward him suddenly in the candle-light. Stood before him.

"Tell me, who are you? What are you?" There was a tragic appeal in her
face. "Where do you come from? Where are you going?"

"I don't know." His throat was dry, his heart pounding. "A few days ago
I was a contented man, unhappy but contented. And now I don't know."

"And I don't know who I am." Her mouth quivered. "I am two people--three
people."

They looked at each other with a sort of agony, as though they had lost
something dear to each, and to both of them. They were immensely
intimate. He put out his hand....

"Poor ... poor...."

Their hands touched, and there seemed to rush between them, through
them, some powerful current; and how it happened he did not know, but
they were kissing each other.... He th