He had a dear, funny habit, which heightened this effect: he would put his outspread fingers to his head as if he were going to run them through a mass of hair; but the hair was not there, and so he clapped his hand instead on his bare temples. He seemed compounded of force and resolution, which commanded her admiration and even awe. But his physique was not of the most robust, although a golden-brown hue of health, fresh from the South, tinged his cheek. His throat was delicate, his breath from time to time came in gasps, and when his eyes became veiled with fatigue, after some introspective probings, there was something pathetically boyish about him that awakened maternal tenderness. "Ah, so this is you!" she thought, and stretched herself in blissful languor. "This is you at last, at last." "Why do you shut your eyes?" he asked, concerned. "Aren't you feeling well?" "Yes, oh yes," she said, flattering him with her eyes and mouth. "But do, please, tell me more about the land of my desires, where I have always wanted to go and where I have never been." She then described to him her youthful longing, which the consumptive master had awakened in her, the longing which had continued to smoulder amidst the ashes of her life's experience. "In your place I should have tramped there as a barefooted pilgrim," he said. "Oh, but I've had money enough to go often. I could have afforded it perfectly well. Once I was as far on the road as Bozen. But I had to turn back as a punishment because a young man made eyes at me." "How sad!" he said, laughing. "That was hard lines on you, harder than you have any conception of." "I have some conception," she sighed. "I have only got to look at you to be convinced of how hard it was." "Why me?" "Because you shine like Moses after he had looked on the glory of the Lord." He became serious at once. "There are glories here, too, if we have eyes to see them," he said. "But, nevertheless, you are right. I am so chock-full of the life and reflected radiance that I have stored up there, so many sources have been opened out, so many seeds have germinated, that I scarcely know how to use all my vast wealth, I write till my fingers bleed, and there is always more to write.... I want to give, give, and go on giving; but to whom I don't know." "To me!" she implored, holding out her hands, palms upwards. "To me! I am so desperately poor. Such a beggar!" With the stern eyes of a visionary he gazed down on her. "You are not poor," he said. "You have merely been allowed to starve." "Isn't it the same thing?" He shook his head, still fixing her with his gaze. "What was your husband?" he asked next. "I ... am the divorced wife ... of an officer of high rank," she replied, dropping her eyes to the floor. Thank God! This time she had not lied. But hadn't she? What was she _now_? For a moment he pressed her hand, which lay on the table.