"I never thought I would feel like this—but I seem to feel her about you—some woman you must have loved greatly—" *12* Romney forgot the Gobi. Rarely were they altogether out of its influence in Nadiram and this room, but the story that was called stirred him to the old beat of the world. He felt distantly as he had during his tests in the house of Minglapo. This killed out instantly any idea of policy. The truth was all he knew, but the truth here was a different affair from dealing with Chinese who might take or leave what he had to offer according to their whim. Here was a tense face of a woman who had crushed her pride to ask such a question.... He told her how the big devils and virtues had opened in him from the encounter with Moira Kelvin, what he had been before the meeting on the deck of the _Sungkiang_—and what he had been since. He told her in ten minutes how he had cast all into the Great Drift, and had been spared in spite of himself—how the thrall of Moira Kelvin had gone out of his heart, and how he had met her again in the presence of her mate. "She made me know that there can be no doubt in a great love-story," he added. "She made me know that there is no such thing as a triangle; that a man or a woman in doubt between two, loves neither as the world shall presently know love. She made me know that love cannot be altogether on one side—that mine could not hold because she had not the same for me. The mystery of its falling from me in the Great Drift revealed that. She opened my heart for the woman I was to find. I did not believe when she told me that, but I have come to believe it. After I saw her behind the low shoulders of Nifton Bend—I knew that my heart’s desire was still a-field, and that all she had said was truth. The power of this truth was opened to me the night I rode into this little court—" Her eyes were turned out to the sunlight. "It seemed that I had come home that moment," he added. "I did not want to leave you that night. I never did a harder thing than to call for the camels the next morning. And when you put your hand on the leather at my foot—it was not until then that I knew what our meeting meant to you. Realising that—the transaction was finished, so far as I was concerned." "I never thought I would feel like this," she repeated. "It was like a review of all the hells," he said, meaning the Drift. "I look at the years before that as a kind of semi-sleep. I moved about only partly conscious—studying, watching, laughing at things, fancying I was somebody, thinking I had done something when I got into the pulse of China. The fact is, the Romney of those days wasn’t ready to come into the court of this little Consulate—" Her face was still turned away. Very quickly the flaw appeared in his last sentences. He was making very light of a wastrel period—a period without will and organised manhood of any kind.