ndow at the
old gentleman, who was in trouble with his yacht, which had capsized
just beyond walking-stick reach. 'It was like him to trust a stranger,'
she murmured.

"'He was good enough to make use of me because I was an Englishman,' I
replied.

"'And that was like him, too,' she returned, kindling again. 'It was a
great grief to him that business prevented him from living with us here
in Hampstead. He loved the English ways. He used to say in joke that he
would certainly marry an English wife if he could induce any of them to
marry him. But of course he met his fate. He wrote hoping we would love
her. We shall do that, of course, but----' she looked out again at the
old gentleman who had found a small boy volunteer to paddle out,
bare-legged, to salve the yacht.

"'But what?' I asked.

"'She will marry again,' Miss Kinaitsky remarked in a low tone. 'I am
positive. I do not see how we can blame her. She submitted to the
arrangement. But she did not love him. We feel it, because he spoke of
her in such terms ... it was almost adoration. There was never any other
woman for him....'

"A silence fell between us because, as you can easily imagine, I had
nothing to offer commensurate with the extraordinary exaltation of her
mood. It was plain enough that to a woman like her love could not
possibly be what I had conceived it. To her it was a divine flame
through which she would discern the transfigured features of her
beloved. To her it was a supreme sacrament administered in a sacred
chamber whence had been shut out all the evil which impregnates the
heart of man. And I sat there wondering. When I left that sumptuous and
smoothly running mansion and walked out across the Heath in the dusk
toward the Spaniards Inn, I was still wondering whether each of us could
be right. And I wonder still. For if it were true that love were what
she and her kind imagine it to be, then I had never seen it. To me it
had been nothing so transcendentally easy as that. To me it had been an
obscure commotion, an enigmatic storm on which the human soul, with its
drogue of inherited sorrows, was flung on its beam ends, stove in and
dismasted, while beyond, far off, there shone a faint light, the flash
of a derisive smile, flashing and then suddenly going out. And even now,
in the mists of the accumulating years, I wonder still."

For the last time Mr. Spenlove paused, and stepping out to the rail, he
stood there, with his back to the men w