The hours had passed magically. It was he who had risen first. He was afraid of the woman, afraid as he had never been before, of some intrinsic lacking of his own. He felt at times that his own presence had nothing to do with her ideal—that she was merely telling her story as she might have done to some woman companion. Then there were other moments of personal relation—as if she felt from the first the power she possessed for him; that she was interested in making it greater; that she loved the use of her power in his arousing; even that he might be or become something of this solar being she dreamed of.... Always with her was the feeling that she was not interpreting herself exactly, some histrionic weakness—that she was carried away in the ardour of her impulses; that she acted perfectly the moment, but was not exactly that. Romney hated the logic of the male mind that persistently brought him this observation. They were together the next afternoon at Longstruth’s _Pyramids_ by the river, a little table in the bamboo clumps with the most famous tea of the Empire. Two white butterflies were whirling together persistently near. Moira Kelvin’s eyes followed them dreamily. Romney said: "They make me think of the States—little common kid-day butterflies. I don’t know as I ever saw them before in China." "They are around the world," she answered. "They are always where I am because I see them. Always two—like bluebirds, and always silent like bluebirds. I see them and all well-paired things.... Once in Ireland in the fall of the year I found a cocoon, a very large and different one. It was on an old lilac tree near the bedroom window where I slept as a child. The silk was gray brown, a filmy weave like a dress my mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that dress—ah, the moths, I was telling you. I broke the branch and took the cocoon to the room. Then there was a night in the following June when I happened to be home for a few days. It was a misty windless evening of endless twilight. Great purple mists came up and breathed upon the earth and mated and melted into the holy breath that hung over the grove of copper beeches.... I am hungry and thirsty to-day, Sir Romney, or I would not talk like this. Sometimes Nature maddens me.... "But I was telling you of that June night. There was a rustle in the corner, and I ran from the little room. That house was full of ghosts to me, and there seemed no love in the world—only loneliness and twilight—my heart streaming its torrent upward and outward, but seeming to touch no living thing.