Twice she looked around as though to interrupt his preoccupation, but he neither responded nor even seemed to be aware of her; and she sighed imperceptibly and followed his errant eyes with her own.

At last: 

“Is there no way out of it for you, Louis?  I am not thinking of myself,” she added simply.

He turned fully around.

“If there was a way out I’d take it and marry you.”

“I did not ask for that; I was thinking of you.”

He was silent.

“Besides,” she said, “I know that you do not love me.”

“That is true only because I will not.  I could.”

She looked at him.

“But,” he said calmly, “I mustn’t; because there is no way out for me—­there’s no way out of anything for me—­while I live—­down here.”

“Down—­where?”

“On this exotic planet called the earth, dear child,” he said with mocking gravity.  “I’m a sort of moon-calf—­a seed blown clear from Saturn’s surface, which fell here and sprouted into the thing you call Louis Malcourt.”  And, his perverse gaiety in full possession of him again, he laughed, and his mirth was tinctured with the bitter-sweet of that humorous malice which jeered unkindly only at himself.

“All to the bad, Virginia—­all to the bow-wows—­judging me from your narrow, earthly standard and the laws of your local divinity.  That’s why I want to see the real One and ask Him how bad I really am.  They’d tell me down here that I’ll never see Him.  Zut!  I’ll take that chance—­not such a long shot either.  Why, if I am no good, the risk is all the better; He is because of such as I!  No need for Him where all the ba-bas are white as the driven snow, and all the little white doves keep their feathers clean and coo-coo hymns from dawn to sunset....  By the way, I never gave you anything, did I?—­a Chinese god, for example?”

She shook her head, bewildered at his inconsequences.

“No, I never did.  You’re not entitled to a gift of a Chinese god from me.  But I’ve given eighteen of them to a number of—­ah—­friends.  I had nineteen, but never had the—­right to present that nineteenth god.”

“What do you mean, Louis?”

“Oh, those gilded idols are the deities of secrecy.  Their commandment is, ‘Thou shalt not be found out.’  So I distributed them among those who worship them—­that is, I have so directed my executors....  By the way, I made a new will.”

He looked at her cheerfully, evidently very much pleased with himself.

“And what do you think I’ve left to you?”

“Louis, I don’t—­”

“Why, the bridle, saddle, crop, and spurs I wore that day when we rode to the ocean!  Don’t you remember the day that you noticed me listening and asked me what I heard?”

“Y-yes—­”

“And I told you I was listening to my father?”

Again that same chilly tremor passed over her as it had then.