and then you will understand why your coming has not hurt it. At
first I was unreasonably disturbed because I thought that I must finish it
within a week from to-day. I start out on a new adventure then--a strange
adventure, into the North."

"That means--the wild country?" she asked. "Up there in the North--there
are no people?"

"An occasional Indian, perhaps a prospector now and then," he said. "Last
year I travelled a hundred and twenty-seven days without seeing a human
face except that of my Cree companion."

She had leaned a little over the table, and was looking at him intently,
her eyes shining.

"That is why I have understood you, and read between the printed lines in
your books," she said. "If I had been a man, I would have been a great deal
like you. I love those things--loneliness, emptiness, the great spaces
where you hear only the whisperings of the winds and the fall of no other
feet but your own. Oh, I should have been a man! It was born in me. It was
a part of me. And I loved it--loved it."

A poignant grief had shot into her eyes. Her voice broke almost in a sob.
Amazed, he looked at her in silence across the table.

"You have lived that life, Ladygray?" he said after a moment. "You have
seen it?"

"Yes," she nodded, clasping and unclasping her slim white hands. "For years
and years, perhaps even more than you, John Aldous! I was born in it. And
it was my life for a long time--until my father died." She paused, and he
saw her struggling to subdue the quivering throb in her throat. "We were
inseparable," she went on, her voice becoming suddenly strange and quiet.
"He was father, mother--everything to me. It was too wonderful. Together
we hunted out the mysteries and the strange things in the out-of-the-way
places of the earth. It was his passion. He had given birth to it in me. I
was always with him, everywhere. And then he died, soon after his discovery
of that wonderful buried city of Mindano, in the heart of Africa. Perhaps
you have read----"

"Good God," breathed Aldous, so low that his voice did not rise above a
whisper. "Joanne--Ladygray--you are not speaking of Daniel Gray--Sir Daniel
Gray, the Egyptologist, the antiquarian who uncovered the secrets of an
ancient and wonderful civilization in the heart of darkest Africa?"

"Yes."

"And you--are his daughter?"

She bowed her head.

Like one in a dream John Aldous rose from his chair and went to her. He
seized her hands and drew her