At first the monotony of the long silent winter days was intolerable. But gradually, by such short degrees, that she hardly realised the change taking place within her, she grew to love her solitude and to be grateful for it. For the first time since she had left Monterey her hours were absolutely her own. She had longed for the solitude of a forested mountain top. From her prison window she could see the naked tops of a clump of trees above the buildings opposite, and even her obedient imagination could not expand them to primeval heights; but at least she had solitude and not a petty detail to annoy her. She sometimes wondered if it mattered where one spent the few years of this unsatisfactory life. Nothing was of permanent satisfaction. Strongly as she had been infatuated with newspaper work the interest would have lasted only just so long. She found her modernity slipping from her, herself relapsing into the dreaming child of the tower with vague desire for something her varied experience of the world had not helped her to find. Inevitably she came to know herself and the large demands of her nature, and as inevitably she said to Morgan Steele one day,— “I think you have known all along that it was a mistake.” “Yes,” he said, “I have known it.” “You have everything—everything,—good looks and distinction, brains and modernity, magnetism of a queer cold sort, knowledge of women and kindness of heart—I cannot understand. But the spark, the response, the exaltation is not there,—the splendid rush of emotion. I love you, but not in the way that makes matrimony marriage.” He looked at her with his peculiar smile, an expansion of one corner of his mouth which gave him something of the expression of a satyr. “You were badly in need of a companion, and you found one in me. You wanted to be understood, and I understood you. You wanted sympathy, and I sympathised with you; but I am not the man, and I have never for one moment deluded myself.” “Then why would you have allowed me to drift into matrimony with you?—as I should have done if I had not come here.” “Because the experiment would have been no more dangerous than most matrimonial experiments. And it would have been very delightful for a time.” “I should have loved you a good deal,” she said musingly, “and habit is a tremendous force. And I should never have permitted myself to recognise a mistake again—if the decisive step had been taken. Tell me—” she added abruptly, “do you believe that if I had married you that you would always have loved me?” “I certainly should never have been so unwise as to promise to, for that is something no man can foretell. The chances are that I should not. All phases of feeling are temporary,—all emotions, all desires, all fulfilment. Life itself is temporary.” “Should you have been true to me?”