His voice was eager. "I had to see you. To stay in exile
any longer was unendurable. I was thinking of you always, wanting you
always, and so I came. You forgive me, don't you?"

Marcia laughed. "It's very nice to be wanted," she answered, "but sit
over there across the hearth and light your cigar. It's gone out."

Paul looked down resentfully at the cigar and lifted his hand to toss it
away, but the girl laid her fingers on his wrist and laughed.

"No," she commanded. "Smoke it. Tobacco is soothing and I like the
fragrance. It's a Romney panatella, isn't it?"

"How do you manage to remember details like that?" Paul inquired with
boyish pleasure. "Other women don't carry in mind the brand of tobacco
that a man prefers."

"I'm not other women," she reminded him lightly. "I have a genius for
minute and trivial things. The others flatter you by burning incense to
your music--and I remember that you take two lumps of sugar in your
coffee and one slice of lemon in your tea and that you must have your
Martini extra dry."

To herself she was saying, with a lump in her throat which waged war on
the bright smile in her eyes, "I hoped that he might have come
differently. I hoped that he might have made an end of vacillation. Now
it's all going to be harder. I must send him away again--"

One hand which fell over the arm of her chair and which he could not see
clutched its fingers convulsively, squeezing the handkerchief it held
into a small wad of linen.

"You are wonderful, Marcia," he told her softly as he comfortably
exhaled a cloud of blue smoke, and his delicate lips fell into a smile
of contentment. His troubles were for the moment being assuaged in the
effortless indolence of the lotus-eaters. He looked at her through
half-closed lids, studying the face that smiled at him. Yes, she was
giving him her strength. He would go back tomorrow appeased and soothed.

Then he suggested with the suddenness of a newly discovered thought:
"But we've been talking about my troubles all the while. Tell me
something about yourself. It must be proving a hard trip, isn't it? A
bit of a trial at times?"

A hard trip! A bit of a trial at times! For an instant the smile died
and the lips stiffened. She wanted to answer him with a stormy burst of
words. She wanted to say that it had been sheer hell.

In the face of such callous complacency an indignant anger stirred deep
in her breast. He had fled to her with his troubles, which aft