She threw her arms suddenly about him.  “Let me go down to him,” she whispered.  “Perhaps I can persuade him.  Maybe he’ll go away, then, and leave you in peace.”

He stroked her hair.  “No, I can’t escape him now.  Sooner or later he would get me.  You don’t understand his power.  All my life I’ve dodged issues.  But now I’ve run up against a stone wall.  Either I scale it or I break my neck in the attempt.”

She shivered as if his touch filled her with an exquisite fear as she drew away.

“I’m wondering if you are quite real,” she said, wistfully.  “Sometimes I’ve thought of you as dead, and, again, it didn’t seem possible...  Always at night upon the street I’ve really looked for you.  In every face that stared at me I had a hope that your eyes would answer mine...  I think I’ve looked for you all my life...  It isn’t always necessity that drives a woman to the streets...  Sometimes it is the search for happiness...  I suppose you can’t understand that...”

“I understand anything you tell me now!”

She went over to him again and took his hand.  “You are real, aren’t you?...  Because I couldn’t bear it ... if I were to wake up and find this all a dream...  Nothing else matters ... nothing in my whole life ... but this moment.  And when it is over nothing will ever matter ... again.”

He sat there stroking her hand foolishly.  There were no words with which to answer her...  Presently she put her lips close to his and he kissed her, and he knew then that only a woman who had tasted the bitter wormwood of infamy could put such purity into a kiss.  How many times she must have hungered for this moment!  How many times must she have felt her soul rising to her lips only to find it betrayed!

He loved her for her words and he loved her for her silence.  Once he would have sat waiting passionately for her to defend herself.  He would have been tricked into believing that any course of action could be justified.  But she brought no charges, she placed no blame, she offered no excuse.  “It isn’t always necessity that drives a woman to the streets!” It took a great soul to be that honest.  She might have reproached him, too, for his neglect of her—­for his fear to take his happiness on any terms.  But all she had said was, “You shouldn’t have watched me like that ... it wasn’t fair.”

He rose, finally, shaking himself into the world of reality again.

“I must be going now,” he said, quietly.  “Storch will begin to be impatient.”

She picked a gilt hairpin from the floor.  “Let me see if I’ve got everything straight.  To-morrow at eleven o’clock I am to see Hilmer and tell him to postpone the launching.  And to watch at the north gate for a man with a kodak...  And then?”

He reached for his hat.  “If you do not hear from me you might come and look me up.  I’ll be at Storch cottage on Rincon Hill ... at the foot of Second Street.  Anyone about can tell you which house is his.”