Time cured this mood; but the passing of doubt and the restoration of the lover to favor helped her little to serenity. She recalled every look, the tones of his voice, every moment they had snatched together, all that he had taught her. She remembered every trick of speech and expression, the lighter but still personal habit they had fallen into of sitting apart for a few minutes after the tea-hour, while the others were drinking their coffee in one of the reception-rooms, at the opera and theatre, or riding to the Schwabenberg in the early morning. These had become established habits, and she regretted them almost as intensely as the more concentrated moments; she had known to the full the tantalizing sweetness of the intimate understanding in a crowd. And she recalled all she knew of him through the stories he had told her of himself in the years before they had met. They revealed him in many phases, and she had often lingered on them when alone. But there was one that now seemed to be always in her brain, to rise vividly in the brief moments when she was not struggling with a passion of grief, of regret, above all striving to tear her mind from the uncertainty, the maddening inability to act. It was a brief graphic story of an adventure in a mountain-pass in Venezuela, when with three or four men he had been set upon by half a score of the threatened dictator’s followers. The case had been desperate, there had been a few moments when he had never expected to see a wider sky again, and in those moments it was not so much he that had fought as Life itself. His pistol emptied, stabbed, shot, his clothing almost off his back, he was dragged to and fro on the rough mountain-road, hacking, struggling, hating, not a harking in him to his old love of the fight in that gasping tortured wrestle with Death himself; possessed only by the furious determination of Life to persist, to win against the enemy that never for an instant sleeps on its trail--so that the wonder is man lives a month from birth. At the end it had seemed to him that he saw the two ancient enemies at each other’s throats.