lanced form; the sure, sinuous movement; the step measured, yet
free; the dignity come of carrying the head as though it were a pillar
of an Athenian temple, one of the beautiful Caryatides yonder by the
AEgean Sea.

It smote him as a sudden breath of warm air strikes a face in the night
coolness of the veldt. His pulses quickened, he flushed with the soft
shock of it. There she was, refined, civilized, gowned like other women,
with all the manners and details of civilization and social life about
her; yet, in spite of it all, she did not belong; there was about her
still something remote and alien. It had not to do with appearance
alone, though her eyes were so vivid, and her expression so swift
and varying; it was to be found in the whole presence--something
mountain-like and daring, something Eastern and reserved and secret,
something remote--brooding like a Sphinx, and prophetic like a Sibyl.
But suppose that in days to come the thing that did not belong, which
was of the East, of the tan, of the River Starzke; suppose that it
should--

With a great effort he drove apprehension and the instant's confused
wonder far away, and when, come close to him, she smiled, showing the
perfect white teeth, and her eyes softened to a dreamy regard of him,
all he had ever felt for her in the past months seemed concentrated into
this one moment. Yet he did not look like a languishing lover; rather
like one inflamed with a great idea or stirred to a great resolve.

For quite a minute they stood gazing as though they would read the whole
truth in each other's eyes. She was all eager, yet timorous; he was
resolved; yet now, when the great moment had come, as it were, like a
stammerer fearing the sound of his own voice. There was so much to say
that he could not speak.

She broke the spell. "I am here. Can't you see me?" she asked in a
quizzical, playful tone, her lips trembling a little, but with a smile
in her eyes which she vainly tried to veil.

She had said the one thing which above all others could have lifted the
situation to its real significance. A few weeks ago the eyes now looking
into hers and telling a great story were sealed with night, and the
mind behind was fretted by the thought of a perpetual darkness. All
the tragedy of the past rushed into his mind now, and gave all that was
between them, or was to be between them, its real meaning. A beautiful
woman is dear to man simply as woman, and not as the woman; virtue