s, and laid his head in her lap.

She fell asleep early; for, no matter what happened, how uneventful or
how tragically exciting her day was, her faculty for sleep remained
unchanged. It was a brilliant night; in the sky was a great, round,
yellow moon, and the room was lit up by it. The blind of the window
facing the bed had not been lowered; and a square patch of light fell
across the bed. He turned and looked at her, lying in it. Her face was
towards him; one arm was flung up above her head; the hand lay with the
palm exposed. Something in the look of the face, blanched by the unreal
light, made him recall the first time he had seen it, and the
impression it had then left on his mind. While she played in Schwarz's
room, she had turned and looked at him, and it had seemed to him then,
that some occult force had gone out from the face, and struck home in
him. And it had never lessened. Strange, that so small a thing, hardly
bigger than one's two closed fists, should be able to exert such an
influence over one! For this face it was--the pale oval, in the dark
setting, the exotic colouring, the heavy-lidded eyes--which held him;
it was this face which drew him surely back with a vital nostalgia--a
homesickness for the sight of her and the touch of her--if he were too
long absent. It had not been any coincidence of temperament or
sympathies--by rights, all the rights of their different natures, they
had not belonged together--any more than it had been a mere blind
uprush of sensual desire. And just as his feelings for her had had
nothing to do with reason, or with the practical conduct of his life so
they had outlasted tenderness, faithfulness, respect. What ever it was
that held him, it lay deeper than these conventional ideas of virtue.
The power her face had over him was undiminished, though he now found
it neither beautiful nor good; though he knew the true meaning of each
deeply graven line.--This then was love?--this morbid possession by a
woman's face.

He laid his arm across his tired eyes, and, without waiting to consider
the question he had propounded, commenced to follow out a new train of
thought. No doubt, for each individual, there existed in one other
mortal some physical detail which he or she could find only in this
particular person. It might be the veriest trifle. Some found it, it
seemed, in the colour of an eye; some in the modulations of a voice,
the curve of a lip, the shape of a hand, the lines of