Yet now and then, for a moment, she forgot his infirmity. He became the young hero of an idyllic scene such as those that seem attractive enough in adolescence. But unlike those heroes he spoke only of the moment, since it was only the moment of which he could be sure. "You are here!" his eyes said to her, as she entered the room. "I have this hour at least. Nothing else matters." Then, by aid of the sunset, the warm breeze in his face, the flowers on the table, the fragrance of her perfume and the smoothness of her hand, he tried to drown himself in a sea of sensation, like one who listens, in a glamour of stained glass and a cloud of incense, to the protracted sweetness of an organ playing the _Nunc Dimittis_. Sometimes he would say: "When I am gone you will be as fair as ever. That is good. The ancients who entered their temples to worship the goddess must have redoubled their love with the thought that the beauty of her marble person would survive them." Or perhaps: "Yes, you will still be young. And presently--no, I shall pretend that you will never turn to another." He thought her ensuing look of sadness was a reproach to him; but she was reproaching herself. But here was a miracle. The invalid had ceased to decline in health. And that declension, which formerly had been uninterrupted, seemed stopped just by the hand that she had held out to him on that first full day of spring--by the slender hand that had owed its beauty to its apparent uselessness. Then he told her that he had begun to jot down, in feeble signs, some scraps of music. That evening, as she drove home, the city seemed hung with banners. "Ah, fate!" she cried, clenching her fists, and uttering a savage laugh of defiance. She entered her house radiant, erect, shining with triumph. In the black-and-white hall, at the entrance to the drawing-room, a man stood before her, tanned, lean from physical hardships, strange-looking and yet familiar. Instead of a small mustache intended to be debonaire, he had a heavy one; his shoulders were wider and straighter than formerly; he advanced with a quick, swinging step. "Cornie Rysbroek!" She laid her palms, on the new shoulders of this friend of her childhood, and flooded him with her victorious smile. "What have you done to yourself?" she laughed, rather wildly. "Where do you come from? India?" "I went on to China."