"Leave me?" I was still, in my mind, occupied with what now began to seem a monstrous disloyalty to him, my obligation to Polatkin. There had been a great deal about our new venture on the programme, even if he hadn't seen the papers, he must have learned it as soon as he came into the theatre. "Unless you can go with me in an hour ... yes, my dear, I know it is impossible...." He was silent a while, clasping and unclasping my hand on his knee, knitting his brows and staring into the fire with the expression of a man so long occupied with anxiety that his mind, in any moment of release, goes back to it automatically. I stirred presently when I saw that his perplexity had nothing to do with me. "I had a cable in London," he said. "Heaven only knows how long they were getting it down to the coast where they could send it; they have struck water in the mines." I failed to get the force of the announcement except that from the manner of his telling it, it was a great disaster. "I must leave on the twelve twenty-three," he warned me. I did understand that. "Oh, no, _no_! Helmeth!" I cried out. "Not now ... not so soon!" I clung to him crying. "Stay with me to-night ... just for to-night!" We rocked in one another's arms. I remember little broken snatches of explanation. "I've worked _so_, Olivia ... I've worked and sweated ... and now...." Presently he broke out again. "To have worked, and know that your work is sound, and to be played a trick, to lose by a ghastly trick! If there is a God, Olivia, why does He play tricks on a man like that?" "Hush, my dear! Oh, my dear ..." "Do you know what I've been doing since I came ashore? I've been buying pumps, Olivia, pumps, and machinery to work them. Think of the delay; and I'll have to ask Shane for more money ... more ... and I meant to be paying dividends." He held me off from him fiercely with both hands. "Olivia, suppose to-night instead of applause you had heard hisses, and people going out, turning their backs on you in your best lines ... oh ..." He broke off and covered his face with his hands. I crept up to him. "If they had, I should have come back to you, beloved. And I shouldn't have remembered it. Oh, beloved, what are all things worth except that they give us this?" I was on his knee now, and my hair was still in its maiden snood as it had been in the play. I drew it softly about his face. "Oh, my dear, to be _this_ to me, what does it matter about the mines? They will come straight again in a little time. But this ... this is _now_." I could feel the yielding in his frame. He was my man and I did what I would with him. CHAPTER VII Among all the devices with which we confound the Powers forever fumbling at our lives, none must puzzle them more than the set of obligations and interactions that go by the name of business. Unless, indeed, there is a god of business, which I doubt.