"It’s not a matter of place," she had repeated. "I don’t hasten matters by rounding the world every year or two. I know he might just as well cross my own threshold in Ireland or come to one of the late tiger-hunter’s households in England. Not a matter of place, but the right time. I think when we are both ready he will come surely—it must be he who is not ready.... See how the years go. I am older than you, Sir Romney. These are years on the vine now. I am nearing thirty. I am afraid of this waiting. It sometimes makes me feel sour to wait. I don’t want to be sour when he comes. I want one more child—one child from him. I learned something of what it means—oh, just the beginning of that mighty mystery. I would kill him—if he did not prove the real lover. No more tiger-hunters for me. All boyish things would have to be put away by the man I took for my own. He would have to know what it means to be a father. There’s something heroic about that that the world doesn’t dream of yet. My lover would have to understand that. At least, he would have to know when I told him. God, how few are the lovers in the world." Romney pondered this again and again in his berth, sentence by sentence. Once she had laughed and said: "The man I mean—why, his romance is greater to him than his life work." And again, she had bent forward whispering, her hand upon his knee: "Sometimes I feel as if I were strong enough to be the mother of the new race." All this on a little river steamer, deep in China, the rice-lands giving away to the hills as they neared Hankow. Moira Kelvin had but one theme—the lover she would some time know. A frail superb woman burning with a dream. Romney felt that there was stuff in her to endure fire that would wither most women. She had the physique for great emotions. He quite believed that she was capable of killing the man who failed her. He sensed something of her deadly horror in the mistake she had once made. She was different now from the girl-wife of that patient English sportsman. "There are analogies in nature about this killing of the male," she had said. "Look at the fate of the bee whom the queen crowns king in their flight."