“Put it that I fell in love with her. I don’t choose to analyze my feeling more than that. There was everything in it to make me the prey of a passion for her--so long as we hadn’t begun, in Mozambique, by hating each other. She was straight, she was fine, she was thoroughly good; she was also, in her unfailing freshness and her astonishing health, infinitely desirable. By the law of every land she was my wife. There wasn’t a barrier between us except the frail one built of things that had never been said. Of course, I knew that, to her, the barrier doubtless looked insuperable. She considered herself the inalienable property of the man whose bones we were fantastically hunting for. Well: can’t you see that that very fact was peculiarly constructed to whet my hunger? It was maddening to know that shadows could effectually keep two strong, sinewy creatures apart. Our utter isolation in our adventure flung us upon each other. “‘Doch es tritt ein styg’scher Schatten Nächtlich zwischen mich und ihn.’ “One night she had a bad dream; she moaned and cried out in her sleep, and I had to stand outside her tent and listen, while she woke and wept and finally quieted down with little sobs like a child’s. I couldn’t even go in and lay my hand on her forehead to soothe her.” He shook his head, and over his face crept the shadow of the burdened. “Well, that was what I was in for, and I knew I was in for it as long as I should desire her. Finally, I only prayed that we might get safely back to Mozambique, where I could leave her forever. I knew that before my fever ebbed, it would rise in a horrid flood. I wanted her desperately; I should want her more desperately before I got through with it; and I had, for my honor’s sake, not to let her know. It’s odd how many situations there are in life that make it an insult to tell a woman you love her. But I think you’ll agree with me that this is rather an extraordinary case of it. “All this time, I hadn’t the faintest inkling of what she felt: whether she knew, or what she would have thought of me if she had known. There’s something tremendous in the power of ideas. Think of how easy it would have been for me--I won’t say to take what I wanted, though against that background it wouldn’t have seemed such a preposterous thing to do--to insist on her talking it out with me, some night by the fire; how little she could have turned her back on me if I had wanted to ask her a question. But I was as tongue-tied as if we had been in a drawing-room, surrounded with all the paraphernalia of chaperonage. And yet sometimes it didn’t seem possible, with her face and her speech changing like that, week by week, that there shouldn’t be some change in it for me.