The tears ran.  “Pe’haps I shall live it again....”  She dashed her grief away with a hand beringed with stones as big as beetles.

“I said to myself, this man knows something I don’t know.  He’s got the seeds of ete’nal life su’ely.  I made up my mind then and the’ I’d follow you and back you and do all I could fo’ you.  I’ve lived fo’ you.  Eve’ since.  Lived fo’ you.  And now when all my little plans are ’ipe, you—!  Oh!”

She made a quaint little gesture with pink fists upraised, and then stood with her hand held up, staring at the plans and drawings that were littered over the inlaid table.  “I’ve planned and planned.  I said, I will build him a temple.  I will be his temple se’vant....  Just a me’ se’vant....”

She could not go on.

“But it is just these temples that have confused mankind,” he said.

“Not my temple,” she said presently, now openly weeping over the gay rejected drawings.  “You could have explained....”

“Oh!” she said petulantly, and thrust them away from her so that they went sliding one after the other on to the floor.  For some long-drawn moments there was no sound in the room but the slowly accelerated slide and flop of one sheet of cartridge paper after another.

“We could have been so happy,” she wailed, “se’ving oua God.”

And then this disconcerting lady did a still more disconcerting thing.  She staggered a step towards Scrape, seized the lapels of his coat, bowed her head upon his shoulder, put her black hair against his cheek, and began sobbing and weeping.

“My dear lady!” he expostulated, trying weakly to disengage her.

“Let me k’y,” she insisted, gripping more resolutely, and following his backward pace.  “You must let me k’y.  You must let me k’y.”

His resistance ceased.  One hand supported her, the other patted her shining hair.  “My dear child!” he said.  “My dear child!  I had no idea.  That you would take it like this....”

(7)

That was but the opening of an enormous interview.  Presently he had contrived in a helpful and sympathetic manner to seat the unhappy lady on a sofa, and when after some cramped discourse she stood up before him, wiping her eyes with a wet wonder of lace, to deliver herself the better, a newborn appreciation of the tactics of the situation made him walk to the other side of the table under colour of picking up a drawing.

In the retrospect he tried to disentangle the threads of a discussion that went to and fro and contradicted itself and began again far back among things that had seemed forgotten and disposed of.  Lady Sunderbund’s mind was extravagantly untrained, a wild-grown mental thicket.  At times she reproached him as if he were a heartless God; at times she talked as if he were a recalcitrant servant.  Her mingling of utter devotion and the completest disregard for his thoughts and wishes dazzled and distressed his mind.  It was clear that for half a year her clear, bold, absurd will had been crystallized upon the idea of giving him exactly what she wanted him to want.  The crystal sphere of those ambitions lay now shattered between them.