"No, I’m not going around the world clinging to an ancient bereavement.... He was a very good man, patient, a man’s man—a tiger-hunter. It’s all in that. I was younger five years ago. I was so young that I thought for a time my future sufficiently wrapped in his. Then I had his baby. That made a kind of devil of me. I had _lived_ those months. I found that there was something huge and endless about that experience. I am not giving you any cant about motherhood. I could smell and taste and see into things as never before. I was in a rage when he went away to hunt tigers. Why, he took it as a matter of mere nature—as something in the natural course of events—that I should bring _his_ child into the world. I was growing into a real creature and he could not rise out of the annual tiger rhamadan. It is a sort of religion with his family—and couldn’t be broken. And then I was smothered in his family. When the word was brought a kind of madness came over me—sorrow—yes, there was real sorrow. I remembered all his good, but the madness had to do with _perpetuating him_—a man who could leave me in that smothering British household.... It seemed I wanted a child that had nothing to do with him—with them.... What I wanted in those days, I wanted with a kind of madness. They said it was my grief that killed the little one. These things are mysterious.... And now—" She laughed softly. Romney was trying to adjust this story with the earlier talk, but each part destroyed the other. He could as readily believe the first as the final. It dawned upon him that the real truth might lie somewhere between, but there were no tangible forms to grip in this middle distance. He was not inclusive enough to know that she was for the moment intensely what she said. In any event the strange lapses of the tale did not break the enchantment. "Don’t try to understand," she added gently. "No man could understand—at least, none but a very great artist." "But now," he repeated. "Oh, I search and search. I know that travel does not bring me nearer to what I want, but I can’t rest long in one place. He left me everything that the world can give, but I can’t live long in his houses. Yet what I search for is as likely to come to me at home, as here in Asia—" "What is it you search for?" Romney asked. "A man," she said. *2* Romney lay in his berth after midnight. All that he had known and won heretofore was gathered together but did not weigh in the balance against Moira Kelvin. No discrepancy stopped the tumultuous striding of his thoughts after her flying image and the multitude of her sentences. She had amplified her story. Here was a woman brave enough to go out and look for her own. She believed she would know him at once. She believed the woman in her would know before he knew.