vanish nor be pinned down—a man who shut her out of his existence and yet treated her as a possession. She kept seeing the handsome face, the curved red lips, the finely arched nose, the dark mustaches and above all the cold, gray, unfathomable eyes. (If only once he had given way for a moment. If only once that inhuman aloofness had melted, not into a fierce, glowing passion, but into a touching, simple affection. . . .)
"I know what it is," she repeated slowly. "I wondered sometimes . . . in the long evenings, how you endured it. And I wondered too whether I should ever be able to endure it. You see, the difficulty is that I have no time now to experiment. I must decide. If I gave twelve years of my life, I should be . . ." She thought for a second. "I should be forty-seven. I dare not risk failure at that age. That would be unbearable because there would be nothing ahead." Again she was silent for a time and then murmured, "I wanted to talk with you. I should have come to you if we had not met here. . . . I could not have helped it. It was impossible to talk of him with any one who has not known him . . . who has not lived with him. Such a person could not understand what he was like. . . ."
Sabine sat on the edge of her gilt chair, hungrily, with the air of a woman whose most passionate desire was at last being satisfied. For years she had waited. Only once before—on the morning she called at the Rue Raynouard—had she even spoken of the thing. She had said on that occasion, "You know my husband . . . a little. So you can guess perhaps a little of the story." (It was a different Sabine who sat here saying, "My God! How free!")
The cigarette had burned until it scorched her gray gloves. "But it is different with you. He is in love with you. He never loved me. It was you that he loved always. I know that." And with a pained ironic smile, she added, "Sabine Cane dares say what Mrs. Callendar could not even think."
Outside the house the twilight had come down gently over the
