In meditating upon her married life and in conjuring scenes that had long been tossed aside into the lumber-room of imagination, Sylvia's spirit wandered again in the green English country and forgot its exile. The warmth and mystery of the autumnal air drowsed all urgency with dreams of the past; for a minute or two she actually slept. She was soon disturbed by the voices of passing children, and she woke up with a shiver to the imperative and tormenting facts of the present--to the complete lack of money, to the thought of Queenie waiting hungry in Avereshti, and to Rumania clouding with the fog of war. "What on earth am I going to do?" she murmured. "I must sell my bag." The decision seemed to be made from without; it was like the voice of a wraith that had long been waiting incapable of speech, and involuntarily she turned round as if she could catch the spirit in the act of interfering with her affairs. "Were I a natural liar, I should vow it was a ghost and frame the episode of Philip's death with a supernatural decoration. How many people who have penetrated to the ultimate confines of themselves have preferred to perceive the supernatural and in doing so destroyed the whole value of their discovery! Yet lying is the first qualification of every explorer." But setting aside considerations of the subconscious self, Sylvia was for a while horrified at the damnable clarity with which her course of action presented itself. There was no possible argument against selling the bag, and yet to sell it would demand a greater sacrifice than borrowing money from Philip or selling herself to Florilor. The fact that during all this time of strain the idea had never suggested itself before showed to what depths of her being it had been necessary to pierce before she could contemplate the action. Her feeling for the bag far transcended anything in the nature of sentiment; without blasphemy she could affirm that she would as soon have attributed her sense of God in the sacrifice of the Mass to sentiment. But without incurring an imputation of idolatry by such a comparison she could at least award the bag as much value as devout women awarded a wedding-ring; for this golden bag positively was the outward sign that she had affirmed her belief in human love. In whatever tirades she might indulge against the natural depravity of man when confronted by the evidence of it so repeatedly as lately she had been, this bag was a continual reminder of his potential nobility. Certainly a critic of her extravagant reverence might urge that the value of the bag was created by the man who gave it, and that any transference of such an emotion to a natural object was nothing but a surrender to sentiment which involved her in the common fault of seeking to express the eternal in terms of the temporal. But certain acts of worship lay outside the destructive logic of an unmoved critic; the circumstances in which the gift had been made were