There was a pause. I regarded her for a moment or two. She was sunk again in serious reflection. I sighed--at the general dismalness of life, I suppose--and resumed my Arabic. “Seer Marcous.” “Yes?” “Why didn’t you drive me away when I came back?” I shut up the Arabic grammar and went and sat beside her on the fenderstool. “My dear little girl--what a question! How could I drive you away from your own home?” She flashed a queer, scared look at me, then at the fire, then at me again and then burst out crying, her head and arms on her knees. I muttered a man’s words of awkward comfort, saying something about the baby. “It isn’t baby I’m crying about,” sobbed Carlotta. “It’s me! And it’s you! And it’s all the things I’m beginning to understand.” I patted her head and lit a cigarette and wandered about the room, rather puzzled by Carlotta’s psychological development, and yet stirred by a faint thrill at her recognition of my affection. At the same time the sad “too late, too late,” was knelled in my ears, and I thought of the might-have-been, and rode the merry-go-round of regret’s banalities. I had grown old. Passion had died. Hope--the hope of hearing the patter of a child’s feet about my house, the hope of pride in a quasi-paternity, of handing on, vicariously though it were, the torch of life--hope was dead and it was buried in a little white coffin. Only a great, quiet love remained. I was a tired old man, and Carlotta was to me an infinitely loved sister--or daughter--or granddaughter even--so old did I feel. And when I raised her from the fender-stool, and kissed the tears from her eyes, it was as grandfatherly a kiss as had ever been given in this world. The same old problem again. What the deuce to do with Carlotta? Yet not quite the same: rather, what the deuce to do with Carlotta and myself? In our strange relationship we were inextricably bound together.