e
of human effort it was infinitesimal. But who shall say that it was not
worth the doing? Save writing a useless book, in what other sphere of
sublunar energy could I have been effectual? I did not thus analyse my
attitude at the time; the man who does so is a poser, a mime to his
own audience; but looking back, I think I was guided by some such
unformulated considerations.

Although my hermit mania was in itself radically cured, yet I altered
nothing in my relations with the outside world. I wrote to Judith a
brief account of what had occurred and received from her a sympathetic
answer. My reading among the Mystics and Thaumaturgists put me on the
track of Arabic. I found that Carlotta knew enough of the language to
give me elementary instruction, and thus the whirligig of time brought
in its revenge by constituting me her pupil, to our joint edification.

After a while the unhappiness of the past seemed to have faded from her
mind. She spoke little of Paris, less of the dull pension, and never of
Pasquale. She bore towards him an animal's silent animosity against a
human being who has done it an unforgettable injury. On the other hand,
as I have since discovered, she was slowly developing, and had begun to
realise that in giving herself light-heartedly to a man whom she did not
love, she had committed a crime against her sex, for which she had
paid a heavy penalty: a sentiment, however, which did not mitigate her
resentment against him. Often I saw her sitting with knitted brows,
her needlework idle on her lap, evidently unravelling some complicated
problem; presently she would either shake her head sadly as if the
intellectual process were too hard for her and resume her needle, or if
she happened to catch my glance, she would start, smile reassuringly at
me, and apply herself with exaggerated zeal to her work. These fits of
abstraction were not those of a woman speculating on mysteries of the
near future. Such Carlotta also indulged in, and they were easy to
recognise, by the dreaminess of her eyes and the faint smile flickering
about her lips. The moods of knitted brows were periods of soul-travail,
and I wondered what they would bring forth.

One afternoon I came home and found her weeping over a book. When I bent
down to see what she was reading--she had acquired a taste for novels
during the dull pension time in Paris--she caught my head with both
hands.

"Oh, Seer Marcous, do you think they ought to make m