“Oh, you are not dead yet,” he muttered,

“No,” she said with gentle patience.  “There is still some feeling left in me; and if it is any satisfaction to you to know it, you may be certain that I shall be conscious of the last stab.”

He remained silent for a while and then with a polite smile and a movement of the head in my direction he warned her.

“Our audience will get bored.”

“I am perfectly aware that Monsieur George is here, and that he has been breathing a very different atmosphere from what he gets in this room.  Don’t you find this room extremely confined?” she asked me.

The room was very large but it is a fact that I felt oppressed at that moment.  This mysterious quarrel between those two people, revealing something more close in their intercourse than I had ever before suspected, made me so profoundly unhappy that I didn’t even attempt to answer.  And she continued: 

“More space.  More air.  Give me air, air.”  She seized the embroidered edges of her blue robe under her white throat and made as if to tear them apart, to fling it open on her breast, recklessly, before our eyes.  We both remained perfectly still.  Her hands dropped nervelessly by her side.  “I envy you, Monsieur George.  If I am to go under I should prefer to be drowned in the sea with the wind on my face.  What luck, to feel nothing less than all the world closing over one’s head!”

A short silence ensued before Mr. Blunt’s drawing-room voice was heard with playful familiarity.

“I have often asked myself whether you weren’t really a very ambitious person, Dona Rita.”

“And I ask myself whether you have any heart.”  She was looking straight at him and he gratified her with the usual cold white flash of his even teeth before he answered.

“Asking yourself?  That means that you are really asking me.  But why do it so publicly?  I mean it.  One single, detached presence is enough to make a public.  One alone.  Why not wait till he returns to those regions of space and air—­from which he came.”

His particular trick of speaking of any third person as of a lay figure was exasperating.  Yet at the moment I did not know how to resent it, but, in any case, Dona Rita would not have given me time.  Without a moment’s hesitation she cried out: 

“I only wish he could take me out there with him.”

For a moment Mr. Blunt’s face became as still as a mask and then instead of an angry it assumed an indulgent expression.  As to me I had a rapid vision of Dominic’s astonishment, awe, and sarcasm which was always as tolerant as it is possible for sarcasm to be.  But what a charming, gentle, gay, and fearless companion she would have made!  I believed in her fearlessness in any adventure that would interest her.  It would be a new occasion for me, a new viewpoint for that faculty of admiration she had awakened in me at sight—­at first