He looked at her wonderingly,--almost with a kind of terror. “Thank God!” he murmured--“thank God I have not killed you! If I had----!” He dropped into a chair and buried his face in his hands. Still trembling a little as she was, she felt deeply touched by his evident emotion, and with that sudden, new and surprising sense of lightness and buoyancy upon her she ran to him and impulsively knelt down beside him. “Don’t think of it, please!” she said, entreatingly, her always sweet voice striking a soothing note on the air--“Don’t worry! All is well! I’m as alive as I can be. If you had killed me I quite understand you would have been very sorry,--but it really wouldn’t have mattered--in the interests of science! The only trouble for you would have been to get rid of my body,--bodies are always such a nuisance! But with all your knowledge I daresay you could have ground me into a little heap of dust!” And she laughed, quite merrily. “Please don’t sit in such an attitude of despair!--you’re not half cold-hearted enough for a scientist!” He raised his head and looked at her. “That’s true!” he said, and smiled. “But--I wonder what has made you the strange woman you are? No fear of the unknown!--No hesitation, even when death might be the result of your daring,--surely there never was one of your sex like you!” “Oh, yes, I’m sure there have been, and are many!” she answered, rising from her knees, and smiling in cheerful response to his happier expression: “Women are queer things!--and there’s a part of their ‘queerness’ which men never understand. When they’ve lost everything--I mean everything which they, with their particular nature and sentiment, regard as precious, the chief of these being love, which _you_ don’t think matters much to anybody, they get reckless. Some of them take to drink--others to drugs--others to preaching in the streets--others to an openly bad life,--or to any crooked paths leading away and as far as possible from their spoilt womanhood. Men are to blame for it,--entirely to blame for treating them as toys instead of as friends--men are like children who break the toys they have done with. And a woman who has been broken in this way has ‘no fear of the unknown’ because the known is bad enough,--and she does not ‘hesitate to face death,’ being sure it cannot be worse than life. At any rate, that’s how I feel--or, rather, how I _have_ felt;--just now I’m extraordinarily glad to be alive!” “That is because you are conscious of a narrow escape,” he said, with a keen glance at her. “Isn’t it so?” She considered for a moment. “No, I don’t believe it is!” she replied. “It’s something quite different to that. I’m not in the least aware that I’ve had a narrow escape!--but I _do_ know that I feel as happy as a schoolgirl out for her first holiday! That’s rather an odd sensation for a woman ‘of mature years!’ Oh, I know what it is! It’s the globule!” She laughed, and clapped her hands.