To John, no longer quite so hungry, for his salary was larger now, that supper was not so much a meal as a series of delightful additions to his impressions of the finer side of the character of Marien. But with the supper despatched, and his beautiful hostess again lolling in luxurious relaxation, it was her personality once more rather than her character which began to play upon him like an instrument with strings. Lazily she brooded and mused, talked and was silent, drifting from momentary vivacities to periods of depressed abstraction. Again and again John felt her eyes upon him scrutinizingly, estimatingly almost, it seemed to him. Because it was a supremely blissful experience to submit himself thus to the play of her moods, John postponed the declaration he felt impelled to make until it burst from him irresistibly, like a geyser. "Listen!" he broke out excitedly, and began to pour out impetuously the tale of his swiftly ripened infatuation. Marien did listen at first as if surprised, and then with a flush of pleasure that steadily deepened on her cheeks. Even when he had concluded she sat for a moment with lips half parted, eyes half closed, and an expression of enchantment upon her face as if listening to music that she wished might flow on forever. "Do not speak!" John protested suddenly, as her expression appeared to change. "The picture is too beautiful to spoil. Let me take from your lips in silence the kiss that seals our betrothal." But Marien held him off with sudden strength. "Marien, I love you. I love you," he protested vehemently. "No," Marien replied, lifting herself higher amid the pillows and speaking alertly as if she had just been given words to answer. "You do not love me. You love the thing you think I am." John’s blond brows were lifted in mute protest. "Listen!" she exclaimed. "You compelled me to listen. Now I must compel you to listen—mad, impetuous man!" and she seemed almost resentful. "In what you have just been saying, you have written a part for me. You have given me a character. If I could play that part always, I should be what you are in love with, and you would love me always; but I cannot play it always; I can play it seldom. I play it now for an hour and then perhaps never again." "Never again?" Hampstead gasped, something in the finality of her tone thrilling him through with a hollow, sickening note. Her eyelids narrowed as she replied: "You forget that I, too, live the calculating life." There was again that mysteriously sinister meaning in her utterance of the word "calculating."