He nodded. “I know. They’re such everlasting discords. They deafen me. I suppose it’s infernally selfish, but I can’t think of you as an individual, Florence. You’re just myself.” They were too intent now, both of them, for a change of color. “You know, ever since we came here,” he went on, his long fingers running through and through the steel fringes in her lap, “I’ve had the oddest sensation of losing myself—of seeing myself escape. Oh, it’s been wretched!” He shook his head. She paled a little. The meaning under his words—a meaning of which he was unconscious—pierced her. “Did you, really?” he asked her. “Did I?” Her voice trembled. “Try to get away from me?” Oh, to have been sure _she_ had been the reason of his wretchedness! “Are you accusing me of taking back a gift, Tony?” The look he gave her swallowed her fears, and the flippancies they engendered. “Florence,” he said, “you’ve been always giving to me. You never think of getting. You won’t even take what belongs to you—myself, the opera, and whatever I may do or be.” “But, Tony, years ago you gave me all that.” “I offered it, and you refused it—on my account, you said! What a reason!” He repudiated it with a fierce head-shake. “When you are giving your brain, your strength, your life, why won’t you take that much from me?” [Illustration: “‘_Oh, it’s been wretched!_’”] “Suppose I should?” She looked at him as if she half feared a recoil of his eagerness; but the blood, mounting to his face, only gave him a more headlong impetuousness. His answer was as direct as Holden could have made: “Is that yes?” “Why not?” she faltered, her eyes full upon him. “Good Lord!”—his voice was thick—“then there need be no end to anything!” He stooped with that incalculable impulse of his. She swayed away from him. Her black fan seemed to brush him back. “’Sh!” her warning hand was on his. Tall, slightly stooping, Charlie Thair stood between the potted palms, blinking at them out of his narrow eyes. One could not know how much they had seen. They seemed to have seen simply nothing. “I have,” he murmured, “constituted myself a relief expedition. You did very well,” he said to Longacre. “I have spent three quarters of a waltz hunting.” “I did the best I could.” Longacre’s cheerful impudence covered the situation. “You ought to give up sooner, old man.”