Yes; she had changed, though I cannot say that it was in the way of looking older. Rather she had grown to resemble Zuloaga’s portrait of her, which we had always considered too theatrical. Zuloaga had emphasized all her most startling traits—her slenderness, sinuousity, and fantastic grace—her immense black eyes, of which he alone of all the men who had painted her had caught the fire that had been compared to that of the black opal—the long, narrow face that was like Wolf’s, except for being mysterious and baffling—the mouth, haunted by memories that might have survived from another incarnation, since there had been nothing in her present life to correspond to them. You could speak of her as being beautiful only in the sense of being strange, with an appeal less to the eye than to the imagination. More akin to fire than to flesh, she was closer to spirit than to fire. It might have been a perverse, tortured spirit, but it was far from the merely animal. Discriminating people called it her salvation to have married a humdrum chap like me, since, with a man of more temperament, she would have clashed too outrageously. High-handed and intense, she needed some one seemingly to yield to her caprices, correcting them under the guise of giving in. Like others of tempestuous nature, when she was gentle her gentleness was heavenly. She was gentle in that way now. "Sit down, Billy, and let me look at you. Why didn’t you bring your things?" "I didn’t know that you wanted me to do that, or that—that we were to—to begin again." "Of course we shall begin again. What made you think we shouldn’t?" "I didn’t think so. I simply didn’t know." "Did Alice Mountney, or Wolf, tell you anything?" There was a curious significance in the tone, but I let it pass. "Only that you’d—you’d given me up." "What else could I do?" We were sitting half turned toward each other on one of the library sofas, and I seized both her hands. "But now that I’m back, Vio, are you—are you—glad?" Though she allowed her hands to remain in mine there was a flash of the black-opal fire. "It’s not so simple as being glad, Billy. The word isn’t relevant." "Relevant to what?" "I mean that you can’t sum up such a situation as this by being either glad or sorry. We’ve other things to consider." "But surely that comes first. "Neither first nor second. The only question we’ve got to ask for the minute is what we’re to do." "But I thought that was settled—that you wanted me to come back." "It’s settled in the way that getting up in the morning is settled; but that doesn’t tell you the duties of the day." "I suppose one can only meet the duties of the day by going on and seeing what they are." "Exactly; and isn’t that our first consideration—the going on? It doesn’t matter whether we’re glad or sorry, since we mean to go on, or try to go on—anyhow."