“Your wonderful luck,” she breathed out.

“Oh, yes, I am wonderfully lucky.  Unless the luck really is yours--in having found somebody like me, who cares at the same time so much and so little for what you have at heart.”

“What time will you be leaving the harbour?” she asked.

“Some time between midnight and daybreak.  Our men may be a little late in joining, but certainly we will be gone before the first streak of light.”

“What freedom!” she murmured enviously.  “It’s something I shall never know. . . .”

“Freedom!” I protested.  “I am a slave to my word.  There will be a siring of carts and mules on a certain part of the coast, and a most ruffianly lot of men, men you understand, men with wives and children and sweethearts, who from the very moment they start on a trip risk a bullet in the head at any moment, but who have a perfect conviction that I will never fail them.  That’s my freedom.  I wonder what they would think if they knew of your existence.”

“I don’t exist,” she said.

“That’s easy to say.  But I will go as if you didn’t exist—­yet only because you do exist.  You exist in me.  I don’t know where I end and you begin.  You have got into my heart and into my veins and into my brain.”

“Take this fancy out and trample it down in the dust,” she said in a tone of timid entreaty.

“Heroically,” I suggested with the sarcasm of despair.

“Well, yes, heroically,” she said; and there passed between us dim smiles, I have no doubt of the most touching imbecility on earth.  We were standing by then in the middle of the room with its vivid colours on a black background, with its multitude of winged figures with pale limbs, with hair like halos or flames, all strangely tense in their strained, decorative attitudes.  Dona Rita made a step towards me, and as I attempted to seize her hand she flung her arms round my neck.  I felt their strength drawing me towards her and by a sort of blind and desperate effort I resisted.  And all the time she was repeating with nervous insistence: 

“But it is true that you will go.  You will surely.  Not because of those people but because of me.  You will go away because you feel you must.”

With every word urging me to get away, her clasp tightened, she hugged my head closer to her breast.  I submitted, knowing well that I could free myself by one more effort which it was in my power to make.  But before I made it, in a sort of desperation, I pressed a long kiss into the hollow of her throat.  And lo—­there was no need for any effort.  With a stifled cry of surprise her arms fell off me as if she had been shot.  I must have been giddy, and perhaps we both were giddy, but the next thing I knew there was a good foot of space between us in the peaceful glow of the ground-glass globes, in the everlasting stillness of the winged figures.  Something in the quality of her exclamation, something