On the carpet was kneeling a lad of seventeen who was very pale and whose face bore traces of tears. He had declared his love to Eva. Even when the stranger entered he had no impulse to get up; his luckless passion made him blind. Crammon remained standing by the door. “Susan, you’re hurting me!” Eva cried. Susan was startled and dropped the comb. Eva held out her hand to Crammon. He approached and bent over to kiss it. “Poor chap,” she said, smiling, and indicating the lad, “he torments himself cruelly. It’s so foolish.” The boy pressed his forehead against the back of her chair. “I’ll kill myself,” he whimpered. Eva clapped her hands and brought her face with its arch mockery of sadness near to the boy’s. “What a gesture!” Crammon thought. “How perfect in its light completeness, how delicate, how new! And how she raised her lids and showed the strong light of her starry eyes, and dropped her chin a little in that inclination of the head, and wore a smile that was unexpected in its blending of desire and sweetness and cunning and childlikeness!” “Where is my golden snood?” Eva asked and arose. Susan said that she had left it on the table. She looked there in vain. She fluttered hither and thither like a huge black butterfly: she opened and closed drawers, shook her head, thoughtfully pressed her hand against her forehead, and finally found the snood under the piano lid next to a roll of bank notes. “It’s always that way with us,” Eva sighed. “We always find things. But we have to hunt a long time.” She fastened the snood about her hair. “I can’t place your French accent,” Crammon remarked. His own pronunciation was Parisian. “I don’t know,” she answered. “Perhaps it’s Spanish. I was in Spain a long time. Perhaps it’s German. I was born in Germany and lived there till I was twelve.” Her eyes grew a little sombre. IV The lovelorn boy had left. Eva seemed to have forgotten him, and there was no shadow upon the brunette pallor of her face. She sat down again, and after a brief exchange of questions she told him of an experience that she had had. The reason for her telling the story seemed to inhere in thoughts which she did not express. Her glance rested calmly in the illimitable. Her eyes knew no walls in their vision; no one could assert that she looked at him. She merely gazed. Susan Rappard sat by the tile-oven, resting her chin upon her arm, while her fingers, gliding past the furrowed cheeks, clung amid her greyish hair. At Arles in Provence a young monk named Brother Leotade had often visited Eva. He was not over twenty-five, vigorous, a typical Frenchman of the South, though rather taciturn. He loved the land and knew the old castles. Once he spoke to her of a tower that stood on a cliff, a mile from the city; he described the view from the top of the tower in words that made Eva long to enjoy it. He offered to be her guide, and they agreed on the hour and the day.