ncing at the window, as if he saw
what she was seeing. "Ah, but it's different--" She broke off. "I'm not
the person you think me. Until you realize that it's impossible--"

Placing her elbows on the table, she slid her ruby ring up and down
her finger abstractedly. She frowned at the rows of leather-bound
books opposite her. Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly
concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of herself
as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant and
abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same time.

"No, you're right," he said. "I don't know you. I've never known you."

"Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else," she mused.

Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book
which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked
over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing
the book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the
portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed the
frontispiece.

"I say I do know you, Katharine," he affirmed, shutting the book. "It's
only for moments that I go mad."

"Do you call two whole nights a moment?"

"I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you
are. No one has ever known you as I know you.... Could you have taken
down that book just now if I hadn't known you?"

"That's true," she replied, "but you can't think how I'm divided--how
I'm at my ease with you, and how I'm bewildered. The unreality--the
dark--the waiting outside in the wind--yes, when you look at me, not
seeing me, and I don't see you either.... But I do see," she went on
quickly, changing her position and frowning again, "heaps of things,
only not you."

"Tell me what you see," he urged.

But she could not reduce her vision to words, since it was no single
shape colored upon the dark, but rather a general excitement, an
atmosphere, which, when she tried to visualize it, took form as a wind
scouring the flanks of northern hills and flashing light upon cornfields
and pools.

"Impossible," she sighed, laughing at the ridiculous notion of putting
any part of this into words.

"Try, Katharine," Ralph urged her.

"But I can't--I'm talking a sort of nonsense--the sort of nonsense one
talks to oneself." She was dismayed by the expression of longing and
despair upon his face. "I was thinking about a mountain in th