he cried. "I didn't." She almost screamed. "I thought you
understood. I would have married anybody who would have taken me out of
prison. He was going to take me out of prison to places where I could
breathe." She fell back onto her heels and beat her breast with both
hands. "I was dying for want of air. I was suffocating."

Her intensity caught him. He lumbered to his feet.

"What are you talking about?"

She rose, too, almost with a synchronous movement. An interested
spectator, I continued sitting, my hands clasped round my knees.

"The little prison you put me into. I felt this in my throat"--and
forgetful of the admirable Mrs. Considine's discipline she mimed her
words startlingly--"I was sick--sick--sick to death. You forget, Jaff
Chayne, the mountains of Albania."

"Perhaps I did," said he, with his steady eyes fixed on her. "But I
remember 'em now. Would you like to go back?"

She put her hands for a few seconds before her face, as though to hide
swift visions of slaughtered enemies, then dashed them away. "No. Not
now. Not after--No. But mountains, freedom--anything unlike prison. Oh,
I've gone mad sometimes. I've wanted to take up a fender and smash
things."

"I've felt like that myself," said Jaffery.

"And what have you done?"

"I've broken out of prison and run away."

"That's what I did," said Liosha.

Then Jaffery burst into his great laugh and held her hands and looked at
her with kindly, sympathetic mirth in his eyes. And Liosha laughed, too.

"We're both of us savages under our skins, old lady. That's what it
comes to."

No more was said of Ras Fendihook. The man's broad, flashy good-humour
had caught her fancy; his vagabond life stimulated her imagination of
wider horizons; he promised her release from the conventions and
restrictions of her artificial existence; she was ready to embark with
him, as his wife, into the Unknown; but it was evident that she had not
given him the tiniest little scrap of her heart.

"Why didn't you tell me all this long ago?" asked Jaffery.

"I tried to be good to please you--you and Barbara and Hilary, who've
been so kind to me."

"It's all this infernal civilisation," he declared. "My dear girl, I'm
as much fed up with it as you are; I want to go somewhere and wear
beads."

"So do I," said Liosha.

I thought of Barbara's lecture on the whole duty of woman and I
chuckled. The attitude in which I was, my hands clasped round my knees,
consorted with