“Ah!  It’s now that you are trying to murder him,” she cried.

“Really.  Always the Renouard of shopkeepers’ legend.  Listen!  I would never have been jealous of him.  And yet I am jealous of the air you breathe, of the soil you tread on, of the world that sees you—­moving free—­not mine.  But never mind.  I rather liked him.  For a certain reason I proposed he should come to be my assistant here.  He said he believed this would save him.  It did not save him from death.  It came to him as it were from nothing—­just a fall.  A mere slip and tumble of ten feet into a ravine.  But it seems he had been hurt before up-country—­by a horse.  He ailed and ailed.  No, he was not a steel-tipped man.  And his poor soul seemed to have been damaged too.  It gave way very soon.”

“This is tragic!” Felicia Moorsom whispered with feeling.  Renouard’s lips twitched, but his level voice continued mercilessly.

“That’s the story.  He rallied a little one night and said he wanted to tell me something.  I, being a gentleman, he said, he could confide in me.  I told him that he was mistaken.  That there was a good deal of a plebeian in me, that he couldn’t know.  He seemed disappointed.  He muttered something about his innocence and something that sounded like a curse on some woman, then turned to the wall and—­just grew cold.”

“On a woman,” cried Miss Moorsom indignantly.  “What woman?”

“I wonder!” said Renouard, raising his eyes and noting the crimson of her ear-lobes against the live whiteness of her complexion, the sombre, as if secret, night-splendour of her eyes under the writhing flames of her hair.  “Some woman who wouldn’t believe in that poor innocence of his. . .  Yes.  You probably.  And now you will not believe in me—­not even in me who must in truth be what I am—­even to death.  No!  You won’t.  And yet, Felicia, a woman like you and a man like me do not often come together on this earth.”

The flame of her glorious head scorched his face.  He flung his hat far away, and his suddenly lowered eyelids brought out startlingly his resemblance to antique bronze, the profile of Pallas, still, austere, bowed a little in the shadow of the rock.  “Oh!  If you could only understand the truth that is in me!” he added.

She waited, as if too astounded to speak, till he looked up again, and then with unnatural force as if defending herself from some unspoken aspersion, “It’s I who stand for truth here!  Believe in you!  In you, who by a heartless falsehood—­and nothing else, nothing else, do you hear?—­have brought me here, deceived, cheated, as in some abominable farce!” She sat down on a boulder, rested her chin in her hands, in the pose of simple grief—­mourning for herself.

“It only wanted this.  Why!  Oh!  Why is it that ugliness, ridicule, and baseness must fall across my path.”

On that height, alone with the sky, they spoke to each other as if the earth had fallen away from under their feet.