“But how will your husband’s brother get the money for you in that case?” I said.

“What a lot of questions you do ask, Treevor!” she returned sulkily.  “I don’t know how he will get the money.  He will make Nanine give him some, I suppose.  Let us forget it all, I don’t want to think of that any more.”

I laughed.

“Very well.  If you have finished your supper, come over here and sit on my knee and we will forget it all, as you say.”

She rose willingly and came over to me, a lovely, shimmering, Oriental vision, dainty and perfect.

“I must paint you, Suzee, some day just as you appear now and call you The Beauty of China, or something like that.  You seem the joy of the East incarnate.”

Suzee frowned and then smiled.

“I do not like such long words.  I do not understand you when you talk like that; but I love you, Treevor, so, so much.”

The misty light of dawn was rolling over ’Frisco when I shewed Suzee her own room, where according to the pact with the manager, she was to sleep.

She shivered as we went into it.

“Oh, Treevor, what a great big room,” she said; “I am frightened at it.  Won’t you stay with me?  Or let me be in yours?”

“I said you should sleep here,” I answered; “so you must.  Jump into bed quick and go to sleep; you will soon forget the size of the room.  I am dead tired now, I must go and get some sleep myself.  Good-night, dear.”

I kissed her and went back to the sitting-room.  The morning light struggling with the artificial fell on the table with its scattered plates and glasses, and on her little trunk and the unpacked silken clothes.

I turned out the lights and drew up the blinds, and stood looking out.  The waves of soft white fog filled the empty streets.  All was quiet, white, in the dawn.

I had said I was tired, yet now sleep seemed far from my eyes, and my mind flew out over intervening space to Viola, longing to find her, wherever she was.

Where would she be?  I could imagine her waking with this same dawn in her calm, innocent bed, and gazing, too, into this white light, and longing for me.  Surely she would be that?  The words of her letter came back to me:  the time would pass “slowly as a winter night to me, your Viola.”

She was right.  Nothing could divide us permanently, really.  Perhaps even Death would be powerless to do that.

I had a dissatisfied feeling with myself.  Would it have been better, I asked myself, to have waited through this year alone, since nothing could really satisfy or delight me in her absence?  What was the good, after all, of chasing the mere shadow of the joy I had with her?

But, strangely enough, I felt that Viola had no wish that I should pass this mysterious year of separation she had imposed upon us, alone.

She had confessed her inability to share my love with any other.  The incident of Veronica had made that clear; but now that she chose to deny herself to me she seemed rather to wish than otherwise that I should seek adventures, experiences elsewhere.  And I felt indefinitely, yet strongly, that the more I could crush into this year of life and of artistic inspiration, especially the latter, the happier she would feel when we met.