"Though, I suppose, I've always got the feeling that it's there," he said, "or that she's there...." "No," he corrected himself quickly. "I can't aspire to that consistency. Even in a sentimental mood with you sitting there trying to look as though you had come to amuse a sick man, whereas you've come to be amused, and well you know it...." Then it was that he told me her name, dwelling on it. "As a preface, I was a very sane young man," he went on, smiling. "I know I must have been, because when I try to find in my youth even one among those rare mornings in which a giant wakes up with the feeling that he could break a lance for a fair lady that day, I can't find one. There never was one, I never woke up so recklessly. And the fact that I may have grown to have that feeling when it's too late and I'm too old to joust carelessly is neither here nor there; it can't bluff me into thinking that once upon a time I, too, could have followed His Grace of Dorset into the river for a Zuleika Dobson--or, more splendidly, for a Fay Richmond, no conjurer nor coquette! For I know dismally that my wildest youth couldn't have shared in that fantasy of love--I was too sane or too stupid, whichever you like. And that's why, instead of being the chief actor, I am only a humble observer in the only play that has ever really mattered in my life.... "One February afternoon, about six years ago, I drove past two people on the Route Corniche between Nice and Monte-Carlo. I was driving alone, a noisy Mercèdes. And I had just swung round a corner on to a straight stretch, when ahead of me I saw a man and a woman come out of the garden gate of a villa. The woman had on a white dress. I looked at it until I was abreast.... And I don't know how I got round the next corner. I don't know if she really recognised me as I whirled past, if she really smiled--perhaps it was only a mocking game that the sun had played on a woman's comely face! Indeed, I thought she had smiled, that old, gentle smile.... For me the whole thing was just a sudden stare, and then a long acute, acute pain. The sort of pain that fixes on the heart and mind, with a doubtful smile to crown its ache.... Wondering about that smile, as of a ghost in a white dress, all the rest of my way on that fiendish, lovely mountain road, I suppose it wasn't my fault that car and self didn't add one more wreck to the credit of Les Alpes Maritimes.... I hadn't seen Fay Richmond for fourteen years, and I have never seen her since then. "I was about twenty-eight or so when I first met the Richmonds, _mère et fille_, in London. Old General Richmond had died a few years before--perhaps luckily, before the Boer War rats got at his reputation as a strategist.