And there were other nights: so many, he might take his choice amongst them. Carnival nights, when she fled away from him and became a spirit, an incarnation of carnival, and the sweep of her dancing eyes over his face was vague and rapid, as though he were a stranger she had never seen before. He used to feel a small despair, thinking that any domino who whirled her away possessed her in closer affinity than he. And when he had at last thankfully brought her back into her room at the hotel, with confetti scattered over the floor, fallen from her carnival clothes, whose tawdry satin and tinsel lay thrown across a chair, then, although he could not have wished her sweeter, she still kept that will-o’-the-wisp remoteness, that air of one who has strayed and been with difficulty recaptured, which made him wonder whether he or anyone else would ever truly touch the secret of her shy and fugitive heart. “How funny you are, Paul. You haven’t turned over a page of your book for at least twenty minutes.” Not a rebuke—merely a placid comment. Another set of Patience nicely dealt out. After that he turned the pages assiduously, it wouldn’t do to be caught dreaming. Then came the relapse.... She had flitted away from him; yes, the day had come when she had flitted. He had known, always, somewhere within himself, that it would come. To whom had she gone?—he didn’t know; he hadn’t tried to find out, perhaps to no one; and, anyway, the fate of her body, passionately as he had loved it, didn’t seem so vital a matter; what mattered was the flame within her; he couldn’t bear to think that she should have given anyone _that_. Not that he was fatuous enough to suppose that he had ever had it. Oh, no!—he was far too humble, too diffident in his mind. He had worshipped her all the more because he knew there was something in her withdrawn, the eternal pilgrim, the incorrigible truant. He knew that he could never have loved any woman who hadn’t that element in her, and since he had only found it once, quite logically he had never loved but once. (He had been young then. It had been easy enough for his relations to pick holes in her: “Flighty,” they had said, and, snorting, “She takes the best years of his life and then throws him aside,” and to all their comments he had never answered once, but had looked at them with deeply wounded eyes, so that they wondered uneasily what thoughts were locked in his heart. Nor had they ever got any information out of him; all their version of the story had been pieced together from bits of gossip and rumour; correct in the main as to facts, but utterly at sea as to essentials. But as he disdained to set them right, they were never any the wiser.) Never loved but once; and here he was, fifty, prosperous, even envied by other men, going daily about his affairs, dining well, talking rationally, a certain portliness in his manner which his figure had escaped.... He and his wife, a commendable couple;