to this
irrevocable thing.

She got up now, swiftly, as though she would again realize how the thing
had happened and stooped over the table above the heap of jewels. They
were great pigeon-blood rubies, twenty-seven of them, fastened together
with ancient crude gold work. She lifted the long necklace until it hung
with the last jewel on the table.

The thing was a treasure, an immense, incredible treasure. And it was
for this--for the privilege of putting this into her hands, that the
man had sold everything he had in England--and endured what the gossips
said--endured it during the five years in India--kept silent and was
now silent. She remembered every detail the rumor of a wild life, a
dissolute reckless life, the gradual, piece by piece sale of
everything that could be turned into money. London could not think of a
ne'er-do-well to equal him in the memory of its oldest gossips--and
all the time with every penny, he was putting together this immense
treasure--for her. A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing
like this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?

She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of
prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower. They were symbols,
each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of sacrifice that
lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic figures illumined with
the halos of romance.

Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that the
girl considered in this marriage. And to-night, suddenly, the actual
physical man had replaced it. And, alarmed, she had drawn back. Perhaps
it was the Teutonic blood in him--a grandmother of a German house. And,
yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from
that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven.

But the man and the ideal seemed distinct things having no relation.
She drew back from the one, and she stood on tip-toe, with arms extended
longingly toward the other.

What should she do?

Had the example of her father thrown on Lord Eckhart a golden shadow?
She moved the bit of flower, gently as in a caress. He had given up the
income of a leading profession and gone to his death. His fortune and
his life had gone in the same high careless manner for the thing he
sought. For the treasure that he believed lay in the Gobi Desert--not
for himself, but for every man to be born into the world. He was the
great dreamer, the great idealist, a vague shinin