Every fibre in him throbbed with a keen and exquisite satisfaction as he sat down opposite her.  During the meal he looked into the quiet, velvety blue of her eyes a hundred times.  He found it a delightful sensation to talk to her and look into those eyes at the same time.  He told her more about himself than he had ever told another soul.  It was she who spoke first of the manuscript upon which he was working.  He had spoken of certain adventures that had led up to the writing of one of his books.

“And this last book you are writing, which you call ‘Mothers,’” she said.  “Is it to be like ‘Fair Play?’”

“It was to have been the last of the trilogy.  But it won’t be now, Ladygray.  I’ve changed my mind.”

“But it is so nearly finished, you say?”

“I would have completed it this week.  I was rushing it to an end at fever heat when—­you came.”

He saw the troubled look in her eyes, and hastened to add: 

“Let us not talk about that manuscript, Ladygray.  Some day I will let you read it, and then you will understand why your coming has not hurt it.  At first I was unreasonably disturbed because I thought that I must finish it within a week from to-day.  I start out on a new adventure then—­a strange adventure, into the North.”

“That means—­the wild country?” she asked.  “Up there in the North—­there are no people?”

“An occasional Indian, perhaps a prospector now and then,” he said.  “Last year I travelled a hundred and twenty-seven days without seeing a human face except that of my Cree companion.”

She had leaned a little over the table, and was looking at him intently, her eyes shining.

“That is why I have understood you, and read between the printed lines in your books,” she said.  “If I had been a man, I would have been a great deal like you.  I love those things—­loneliness, emptiness, the great spaces where you hear only the whisperings of the winds and the fall of no other feet but your own.  Oh, I should have been a man!  It was born in me.  It was a part of me.  And I loved it—­loved it.”

A poignant grief had shot into her eyes.  Her voice broke almost in a sob.  Amazed, he looked at her in silence across the table.

“You have lived that life, Ladygray?” he said after a moment.  “You have seen it?”

“Yes,” she nodded, clasping and unclasping her slim white hands.  “For years and years, perhaps even more than you, John Aldous!  I was born in it.  And it was my life for a long time—­until my father died.”  She paused, and he saw her struggling to subdue the quivering throb in her throat.  “We were inseparable,” she went on, her voice becoming suddenly strange and quiet.  “He was father, mother—­everything to me.  It was too wonderful.  Together we hunted out the mysteries and the strange things in the out-of-the-way places of the earth.  It was his passion.  He had given birth to it in me.  I was always with him, everywhere.  And then he died, soon after his discovery of that wonderful buried city of Mindano, in the heart of Africa.  Perhaps you have read——­”