ay on a sea of horror. Several times her hand quivered
towards the tabloids and came back to the pencil. The shadows seemed to
jostle each other about the room. Kraill's eyes shone out of them for an
instant, blue and impelling. She got a grip on herself and wrote, a word
at a time, making each letter with proud precision:

* * * * *

DEAR PROFESSOR KRAILL,

I am sending you a letter I had from my husband to-day. Have you
forgotten us, and that wonderful thing you did out in the Bush? You told
me then that you liked to interfere in other people's business, but that
they didn't always take the interfering nicely. I want you to know what
your interfering has meant to us.

You will gather from Louis's letter what you meant to him. It is more
difficult to explain what you meant to me. Can you understand if I say
you've been a constant goad to me? It would have been easier for me if I
had never seen you, because you have been the censor of my spirit ever
since. After you went away I was blazing with misery. I hadn't got so
far as you, you see. I was passionately wishing that I'd known you when
you were more on my level. And I saw that you had had a vision of me
that was very much better than I shall ever be now. As Oliver Wendell
Holmes wrote, there are three Marcellas--the one Marcella herself knows,
the one the people round about know, and the one God knows. That was the
one you saw for a minute and, not to disappoint you, I've had to live up
to it. It hasn't been easy. As you will see from his letter, even Louis
doesn't need me now. And as for my boy--I know now, that though beasts
claw at his life and colds and hungers and desolations come to him, they
cannot put out the shine of him. But for me it has been very lonely. I
wanted to be the thing of soft corners and seduction that you were
sickened of. I had to rip myself to bits and make myself the rather
rarefied sort of thing you demanded. I didn't dare not to be brave,
because you were so much enthroned in my life that every thought was a
deliberate homage to you. I might have got considerably happy, and found
many thrills out of thinking about you softly, imagining kisses,
adventures, perhaps. Many women would, and I'm sure many men. I couldn't
do that because it would have made you less shining, though more dear in
my mind. And when I tell you that almost ever since you went away I have
been very ill, much of the time in horrible pai