“That at any rate was a sound idea.  Though we only played with it.

“But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible satisfaction now for me.  What is the good of dreaming?  Life and chance have played a trick upon my body and soul.  I am mated, though I am mated to a phantom.  I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton’s Amanda, but Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams.  Sense, and particularly the sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us.  There can be no mate for me now unless she comes with Amanda’s voice and Amanda’s face and Amanda’s quick movements and her clever hands. . . .”

24

“Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?

“There were things between us two as lovers,—­love, things more beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression, images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin’s knives made out of tears, tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations, gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words for. . . .

“If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been between us more cheaply than I did?  It does not change one jot of it for me.  At the time she did not hold it cheaply.  She forgets where I do not forget. . . .”

25

Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.

Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and himself.

He did not at once turn homeward.  It was in Ceylon that he dropped his work and came home.  At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him, and there were two of these that had started at the same time.  They had been posted in London on one eventful afternoon.  Lady Marayne and Amanda had quarrelled violently.  Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women, full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous letters.  Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.  Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly.  Amanda, on the other hand, generalized, and explained.  Sir Philip’s adoration of her was a love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure.  Was there no trust nor courage in the world?  She would defy all jealous scandal.  She would not even banish him from her side.  Surely the Cheetah could trust her.  But the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda’s explaining.  The little lady’s dignity had been stricken.  “I have been used as a cloak,” she wrote.