d
him. Impossible to know. He experienced that heart-probing, fiery
sense of dangerous loneliness, which sometimes assails the courage of
a solitary adventurer in an unexplored country. The sight of a man's
face--he felt--of any man's face, would have been a profound relief. One
would know then--something--could understand. . . . He would engage a
butler as soon as possible. And then the end of that dinner--which
had seemed to have been going on for hours--the end came, taking him
violently by surprise, as though he had expected in the natural course
of events to sit at that table for ever and ever.

But upstairs in the drawing-room he became the victim of a restless
fate, that would, on no account, permit him to sit down. She had sunk
on a low easy-chair, and taking up from a small table at her elbow a
fan with ivory leaves, shaded her face from the fire. The coals glowed
without a flame; and upon the red glow the vertical bars of the grate
stood out at her feet, black and curved, like the charred ribs of a
consumed sacrifice. Far off, a lamp perched on a slim brass rod, burned
under a wide shade of crimson silk: the centre, within the shadows of
the large room, of a fiery twilight that had in the warm quality of its
tint something delicate, refined and infernal. His soft footfalls and
the subdued beat of the clock on the high mantel-piece answered each
other regularly--as if time and himself, engaged in a measured contest,
had been pacing together through the infernal delicacy of twilight
towards a mysterious goal.

He walked from one end of the room to the other without a pause, like a
traveller who, at night, hastens doggedly upon an interminable journey.
Now and then he glanced at her. Impossible to know. The gross precision
of that thought expressed to his practical mind something illimitable
and infinitely profound, the all-embracing subtlety of a feeling, the
eternal origin of his pain. This woman had accepted him, had abandoned
him--had returned to him. And of all this he would never know the truth.
Never. Not till death--not after--not on judgment day when all shall be
disclosed, thoughts and deeds, rewards and punishments, but the secret
of hearts alone shall return, forever unknown, to the Inscrutable
Creator of good and evil, to the Master of doubts and impulses.

He stood still to look at her. Thrown back and with her face turned away
from him, she did not stir--as if asleep. What did she think? What
di