“It is in the present tense,” he answered. “It’s something that I cannot understand now. Miss Templeton, you have done me the honor of asking me here to-day, and of talking to me with a certain measure of confidence. You have been most gracious and charming, a perfect hostess. I have enjoyed myself completely. And yet—last night, the man who has occupied your thoughts and, let us say, your hopes for years past—was tragically murdered.” She was silent for a second or two. “Is that what you don’t understand?” she demanded abruptly. “Yes. I cannot reconcile the two women I know to exist: The angry, passionate, jealous woman who looked—excuse me—as though she could have done murder herself, a short fortnight ago, and the woman who has been talking to me to-day about her fruitless quest for the Blue Bird of Happiness.” “I think that is rather stupid of you, then,” she answered composedly. “Can’t you see it’s all part of the same thing? The quest for love—for the unattainable—but, Mr. Barrison, that is something else which puzzles you, which, in a way, jars on you. I can see it quite well. It is to you a strange and rather a horrible thing that I should be calm to-day, giving you lunch—and eating it, too!—talking of all sorts of things, while he, the man I used to be in love with, is lying dead. Isn’t that it?” “That is certainly part of it.” After a moment, she pushed back her chair and rose restlessly. “No, don’t get up!” she exclaimed, as he, too, rose. “Sit still, and let me prowl about as I choose. I am not used to expressing myself, Mr. Barrison, except in my actions. Words always bother me, and I never seem able to make myself clear in them. Let me see if I can make you see this thing, not as I do, but a little less confusedly. In the desert, a man sometimes follows a mirage for a long time; longs for it, prays for it, worships it from afar. He is dying of thirst, you see, and his feeling about it is so acute it is almost savage. The mirage isn’t real, the water that he thinks he sees is just a cloud effect, but he wants it, and while he is hunting it, he is not entirely sane. One day he finds it is not real. All that everlasting journeying for nothing; all that thirst for something that never has existed! Men do strange things when they find out that the water they were traveling toward is nothing but a mirage. Some of them kill themselves. But suppose, just when that man was losing his reason with the disappointment and the weariness—suppose just then some traveler, some Good Samaritan, or—just a traveler like himself, or—some—never mind!” She choked whatever it was that she had meant to say. “Suppose, then, some one appears and offers him a real gourd of real water! Does he think much more about the mirage? He only wonders that he ever dreamed and suffered in search for it. But—it had taken the sight of the real clear water to make him see that the other was just a feverish dream.”