. But why touch your words with satire?"

"I believe I read you better than you read me. I didn't mean to be
satirical. Don't you know that what often seems irony directed towards
others is in reality dealt out to ourselves? Such irony as was in my
voice was for myself."

"And why for yourself?" he asked quietly, his eyes full of interest. He
was cutting the end of a fresh cigar. "Was it"--he was about to strike
a match, but paused suddenly--"was it because you had thought the same
thing?"

She looked for a moment as though she would read him through and
through; as though, in spite of all their candour, there was some
lingering uncertainty as to his perfect straightforwardness; then, as
if satisfied, she said at last: "Yes, but with a difference. I have
no doubt which memory it will be. You will not wish to be again on the
plains of Nindobar."

"And you," he said musingly, "you will not wish me here?" There was no
real vanity in the question. He was wondering how little we can be sure
of what we shall feel to-morrow from what we feel to-day. Besides, he
knew that a wise woman is wiser than a wise man.

"I really don't think I shall care particularly. Probably, if we met
again here, there would be some jar to our comradeship--I may call it
that, I suppose?"

"Which is equivalent to saying that good-bye in most cases, and always
in cases such as ours, is a little tragical, because we can never meet
quite the same again."

She bowed her head, but did not reply. Presently she glanced up at him
kindly. "What would you give to have back the past you had before you
lost your illusions, before you had--trouble?"

"I do not want it back. I am not really disillusionised. I think that
we should not make our own personal experience a law unto the world. I
believe in the world in spite--of trouble. You might have said trouble
with a woman--I should not have minded." He was smoking now, and the
clouds twisted about his face so that only his eyes looked through
earnestly. "A woman always makes laws from her personal experience. She
has not the faculty of generalisation--I fancy that's the word to use."

She rose now with a little shaking motion, one hand at her belt, and
rested a shoulder against a pillar of the veranda. He rose also at once,
and said, touching her hand respectfully with his finger tips: "We may
be sorry one day that we did not believe in ourselves more."

"Oh, no," she said, turning and smiling at him, "