He was leaning over the back of her chair; she saw, against the blue when she opened her eyes, his clear, dark skin, his clear, dark contemplative eyes. Her arms slowly raised themselves; her lips muttered unintelligible words which were broken into by the cool of his cheek as she drew him down to her. She rose to her feet and recoiled, and again, with her arms stretched straight before her, as if she were blind and felt her way, her head thrown back and her eyes closed, an Oriental with a face of chiselled alabaster. And with her eyes still closed, her lips against his ear as if she were asleep, she whispered: “Oh, take me! Take me! Now! For good....” But these words that came from her without will or control ceased, and she had none to say of her own volition. There fell upon them the silent nirvana of passion. And suddenly, vibrant, shrill, and interrupted by sobs and the grinding of minute teeth, there rose up in the child’s voice the words: “Nobody must be loved but me. Nobody must be loved but me.” They felt minute hands near their knees; they were parted by a little child, who panted and breathed through her nostrils. They looked at each other with eyes into which, very slowly, there came comprehension. And then, over the little thing’s head, Katya repeated: “Nobody must be loved but me. Nobody must be loved but me.” And with a quick colour upon her cheeks and the wetness of tears in her eyes, “Oh, poor child!” she said. For in the words the child had given to her she recognized the torture of her own passion. That night quite late Katya descended the stairs upon tiptoe. She spoke in a very low voice: “The little thing’s been talking, talking,” she said, “the quaintest little thoughts. I’ve seen it coming for days now. Sometimes I’ve seen her lips moving. She’s the most precise enunciation in the world.” “I wired Ellida this afternoon,” Robert Grimshaw said. “Then Ellida will be down here by the last train?” Katya answered, and he commented: “We’ve only got an hour.” “But little Kitty,” she was beginning. “No, no,” he interrupted. “Nobody must be talked about but us. Nobody must be talked about but us. I’m as glad as you or Ellida or Paul could possibly be about Kitty, but now that I have got you alone at last you’re bound to face the music.” “But little Kitty?” Katya said. She said it, however, only for form’s sake, for Robert Grimshaw’s gentle face was set in a soft inflexibility, and his low tones she knew would hold her to the mark. She had to face the music. In the half-darkness his large eyes perused her face, dark, mournful and tender. The low, long farmhouse room with its cheap varnished furniture was softened by the obscure light from the fire over which he had been standing for a very long hour. “Is it the same terms, then?” he asked slowly, and she answered: “Exactly the same.”