She looked at him quickly. Any one might have said it, but Romney spoke as if he had earned the right, and she questioned that. "The tiger killed my baby, too,—though I was in England—" She said it apparently with little emotion, but Romney sensed a slow pounding of agony in her breast, like a sea that cannot quiet down. "I have thought of everything," she was saying. "I have some philosophy. I have no foolish sense of this life being all—or death being all, but, oh, I was going to take him his little baby—as soon as it was born. I was at his father’s in Kent, England. And to think that a bit of pink paper and the word _tiger_—" Romney was silent. "My baby would have been as old as that little boy with the silly missionary father," she added. "Why silly? I only saw a bent drab man with his particular idea of God—" "Silly because he doesn’t permit the child to hear fairy stories—" "Ah—" Romney found himself regarding her judgment as quite right. He thought he was beginning to understand now, yet she seemed to live too powerfully in the present hour to be lost altogether in a tragedy of five years ago. The look of her eyes had to do with the future, not with the past. At the same time there was something tremendous in the slow, still way she had spoken of her child and its father. A magnificent sort of Englishman he must have been to hold this woman’s life to his.... They were on deck again. The wind had gone down. The moon played upon the mists of the ricelands on the southern shore. To the north the river was crowded with small boats and the myriad lights of a low-lying city were fused into a dull red glow. The woman was thrilling him now with every sentence: "I am not hugging a grief. I see that I gave you that impression. Perhaps I carry it with me—and give it forth from time to time as a matter of habit. It is doubtless as interesting as another, but it is not true. Life is too short to try to make most people understand. If I care enough to explain, I tell a different, a more real story. You are good to talk to. I think I must have been lonely when you came and drew up your chair. That startled me pleasantly—your doing that. At least, I knew you weren’t common. Grown-ups—men and women adults—should dare to be real to each other. How chatty I am—" "I like it. I do feel the gift of it—"