"I need hardly say that as Anna looked at the moonlight and the mist she became recklessly indiscreet. I could not stop her. I did not try. I shut my eyes, and pretended to be asleep. And she actually told this entire stranger all about her first meeting with her late husband, which it seemed had taken place on an expedition to Nepal. Anna was always wandering over the globe with Lamas, or sailing on inflated pigskins with wild Indians, or things of that kind. I had only known the bare fact of her marriage with a distinguished but impecunious soldier who had died some years later, and I was amazed what a dramatic story she made of her first encounter with him on the mountains of Nepal, and how his coolies had all run away, and she let him join on to her party. And how they walked together for three days through a land of rose-coloured rhododendrons; without even knowing each other's name, and how she cooked their meals at the doors of the little mud rest-houses. There was something very lovable after all in the way Anna told it. I realised for the first time that she, too, had lived, that she had been touched by the sacred flame, and that it was natural to her to speak of her great happiness, the memory of which dwelt continually with her. "I saw through my half-closed eyes the strange woman's hand laid for a moment on Anna's hand. "'You were very fortunate,' she said gently. "'Was I?' said Anna. 'I suppose everyone else is the same. We all see that light once in our lives, don't we? I am sure you have too.' "'I am unmarried,' said the stranger, 'and thirty years of age, and nothing of that kind has ever happened to me. I was once engaged to be married for a short time. But I had to break it off. It was no good. I suppose,' she said, with a low laugh, 'that the reason we are both talking so frankly is because we are entire strangers to each other.' "'I do believe the world would go all right, and that we should all be happy if only we did not know each other,' said Anna earnestly. "I felt sure the stranger would think her mad, but she answered tranquilly: "'There are two ways of living absolutely happily with our fellow creatures, I think. When you know nothing about them and have no tie to them, and when you know them through and through. But on the long road between where all the half-way houses are, there seems to be a lot of trouble and misunderstanding and disappointment.' "'We can never know anyone through and through until we love them,' said Anna. "'No,' said the stranger, 'Love alone can teach that. Even I know that, I who have never seen love except once--in a dream.' "'Tell me about it,' said Anna. "'I have never spoken of it,' she said with the same tranquillity; her face as I took one glance at it serene and happy in the moonlight, 'except to my sister. And it is curious that I should speak of it here; for it was in this house it happened to me.' "'You have been here before?' said Anna.