ies, at length.

"But it will come near," Advena replied.

"I don't think it ever can."

She looked at him with a sudden leap of the heart, a wild, sweet dismay.

"They, of course, will come. But the life of which they are a part, and
the man whom I remember to have been me--there is a gulf fixed--"

"It is only the Atlantic," Advena said. She had recovered her vision; in
spite of the stone in her breast she could look. The weight and the hurt
she would reckon with later. What was there, after all, to do? Meanwhile
she could look, and already she saw with passion what had only begun to
form itself in his consciousness, his strange, ironical, pitiful plight.

He shook his head. "It is not marked in any geography," he said, and
gave her a troubled smile. "How can I make it clear to you? I have come
here into a new world, of interests unknown and scope unguessed before.
I know what you would say, but you have no way of learning the beauty
and charm of mere vitality--you have always been so alive. One finds a
physical freedom in which one's very soul seems to expand; one hears the
happiest calls of fancy. And the most wonderful, most delightful thing
of all is to discover that one is oneself, strangely enough, able to
respond--"

The words reached the woman beside him like some cool dropping balm,
healing, inconceivably precious. She knew her share in all this that he
recounted. He might not dream of it, might well confound her with the
general pulse; but she knew the sweet and separate subcurrent that her
life had been in his, felt herself underlying all these new joys of his,
could tell him how dear she was. But it seemed that he must not guess.

It came to her with force that his dim perception of his case was
grotesque, that it humiliated him. She had a quick desire that he should
at least know that civilized, sentient beings did not lend themselves to
such outrageous comedies as this which he had confessed; it had somehow
the air of a confession. She could not let him fall so lamentably short
of man's dignity, of man's estate, for his own sake.

"It is a curious history," she said. "You are right in thinking I should
not find it quite easy to understand. We make those--arrangements--so
much more for ourselves over here. Perhaps we think them more important
than they are."

"But they are of the highest importance." He stopped short, confounded.

"I shall try to consecrate my marriage," he said presently, more