“They write to me, from time to time,” she went on, more quietly, but none the less tragically. “My uncle’s parish is just outside Oxford, a quiet little high-walled place full of flowers and birds. But he is getting very old, and there are six of them, five girls, and Albert, the youngest. Some day I shall go back and live with them—only, in some way, I grow more and more afraid to face them. So I search for excuses to send them money and gifts. They think I’m still a governess here, and I write lying letters to them, and tell them things out of my own head, things quite false and untrue! So, you see, I’ve been nothing but cowardly—and—and wicked, from the first!” “And is that all?” demanded Durkin, not trusting himself to show one jot of feeling. “Yes,” she answered, drearily; “I think that is all.” “But you’re—you’re too good for all this!” he cried impetuously, indignantly. “Why don’t you break away from it, at once?” “I’m going to,—some day! I’ve always waited, though, and everything has dragged on and on and on, and I’ve been half afraid of MacNutt—he’s the type of man, you know, who never forgives a person—and half-afraid of myself. But, some day—” “Oh, I know what it’s like,” cried Durkin, drawn toward her, strangely nearer to her, in some intangible way. She read the sudden look on his face, and blushed under it, almost girlishly, once more. “I want to rest, and be quiet, and live decently, away from the world, somewhere,” she said dreamily, as though speaking only to herself. Durkin walked to the window where she stood, checked himself, strode back to the relay on the work-table, and looked at the huddled instruments, absently. “So do I,” he said, earnestly, with his heels well apart. “Do you?” she asked. He went over to where she stood. “Yes, and I mean to,” he declared, determinedly, turning with her to look at the gathering twilight of the city, and then lapsing into awkward silence once more. CHAPTER III More than once, during the feverish, kaleidoscopic days that followed, Durkin found himself drawing aside to ask if, after all, he were not living some restless dream in which all things hung tenuous and insubstantial. The fine linen and luxury of life were so new to him that in itself it half intoxicated; yet, outside the mere ventral pleasures of existence, with its good dinners in quiet _cafés_ of gold and glass and muffling carpets, its visits to rustling, dimly-lighted theatres, its drives about the open city, its ever-mingled odors of Havana and cut flowers,—there was the keener and more penetrating happiness of listening to the soft English voice of what seemed to him a bewilderingly beautiful woman.