"Oh, I cannot let you live another hour with the thought that I was afraid of what they would think—of your being here. That is a lie. You must have known I care nothing for that. I thought that sending you away would make you start on your mission—I used that. It has almost killed us.... Come in.... Since you will not go—come in to the house with me." She brought the candle to his face. "Oh, you poor—poor—" She seemed not to know whether to say _boy_ or _man_—"how you have suffered—and for me! ... I do not understand it. It seemed weak for you to stay. It has been my greatest anguish that I caused you to stay.... And yet, there is something deathless about it—something I do not understand." *10* There was something about it also that Romney did not understand. Nor could he speak. He watched her in the light of the single candle. Again and again, the face of flesh that he knew, faded into a kind of dream before the intentness of his regard. It was she, and yet another face might have been painted upon it without changing the real identity. And all about it was a vapoury white, different from lamp-light. It was like a visitation from the other side. Out of it her words came to him, but he did not answer at once. The fact is Romney had banked his fires of late in such a heavy and draughtless fashion, that they were in danger of going out. And queerly enough now, certain hardly remembered passages of strangers through Nadiram recurred to mind: wild nomads from the Khingan Mountains driving their scanty flocks to the sparse pastures of the south; Tartars, the true descendants of Genghis Kahn; Buddhist holy men gaunt from their days of fasting in the solitudes; once a skeleton troop of Cossacks that stole in on a mysterious errand and vanished; and the merchants, the everlasting wigglebrows—all strangers on the long road through the days of wasting heat and nights of drawing cold. ... She came to him because he did not speak. There seemed a movement around the room above her head; and the face in the centre of the faint white ray was at his knees. He felt vaguely that if he spoke, the face and all would vanish. "There is something greater than I knew about your waiting," she whispered. "It belongs to the future ... as all that I thought I knew belongs to the past.... I see it differently ... not that you should stay for my sake, but that you felt a woman’s need and remained.... Won’t you speak?"