He ignored her question. "Awful people, implacable, insatiable, pernicious, destructive people. The trackers down, the hangers-on, the persecutors, the pursuers. Did _I_ ever pursue you?" "No, George. I can't say you ever did. I can't see you pursuing any one." "_They_ will. And they'll have you at every turn." "No. I'm safe. You see, I don't care for any of them." "They'll 'have' you all the same. You lend yourself to being 'had.'" "Do I?" She said it defiantly. "No. You never lend--you give yourself. To be eaten up. You let everybody prey on you. You'd be preyed on by me, if I let you." "Oh--you----" "And yet," he said, "I wonder----" He paused, considering her with brilliant but unhappy eyes. "Jinny," he said, "where do you get the fire that you put into your books?" "Where you get yours," she said. Again he considered her. "Come out of it," he said. "Get away from these dreadful people, these dreadful, clever little people." She smiled, recognizing them. "Look at _me_," he said. "Oh, you," she said again, with another intonation. "Yes, me. I was born out of it." "And I--wasn't I born? Look at _me_?" She turned to him, holding her head high. "I am looking at you. I've been looking at you all the evening--and I see a difference already." "What you see is the difference in my clothes. There is no difference in me." It was he who was different. She looked at him, trying to penetrate the secret of his difference. There was a restlessness about him, a fever and the brilliance fever brought. She looked at him and saw a creature dark and colourless, yet splendidly alive. She knew him by heart, every detail of him, the hair, close-cropped, that left clean the full backward curve of his head; his face with its patches of ash and bistre; his eyes, hazel, lucid, intent, sunk under irritable brows; his mouth, narrowish, the lower lip full, pushed forward with the slight prominence of its jaw, the upper lip accentuated by the tilt of its moustache. Tanqueray's face, his features, always seemed to her to lean forward as against a wind, suggesting things eager and in salient flight. They shared now in his difference, his excitement. His eyes as they looked at her had lost something of their old lucidity. They were more brilliant and yet somehow more obscure. Then, suddenly, she saw how he was driven. He was out on the first mad hunt with love. Love and he stalked the hills, questing the visionary maid.