The thing was a treasure, an immense, incredible treasure.  And it was for this — for the privilege of putting this into her hands, that the man had sold everything he had in England — and endured what the gossips said — endured it during the five years in India — kept silent and was now silent.  She remembered every detail the rumor of a wild life, a dissolute reckless life, the gradual, piece by piece sale of everything that could be turned into money.  London could not think of a ne’er-do-well to equal him in the memory of its oldest gossips — and all the time with every penny, he was putting together this immense treasure — for her.  A dreamer writing a romance might imagine a thing like this, but had it any equal in the realities of life?

She looked down at the chain of great jewels, and the fragment of prickly shrub with its poppy-shaped yellow flower.  They were symbols, each, of an immense idealism, an immense conception of sacrifice that lifted the actors in their dramas into gigantic figures illumined with the halos of romance.

Until to-night it had been this ideal figure of Lord Eckhart that the girl considered in this marriage.  And to-night, suddenly, the actual physical man had replaced it.  And, alarmed, she had drawn back.  Perhaps it was the Teutonic blood in him — a grandmother of a German house.  And, yet, who could say, perhaps this piece of consuming idealism was from that ancient extinct Germany of Beethoven.

But the man and the ideal seemed distinct things having no relation.  She drew back from the one, and she stood on tip-toe, with arms extended longingly toward the other.

What should she do?

Had the example of her father thrown on Lord Eckhart a golden shadow?  She moved the bit of flower, gently as in a caress.  He had given up the income of a leading profession and gone to his death.  His fortune and his life had gone in the same high careless manner for the thing he sought.  For the treasure that he believed lay in the Gobi Desert — not for himself, but for every man to be born into the world.  He was the great dreamer, the great idealist, a vague shining figure before the girl like the cloud in the Hebraic Myth.

The girl stood up and linked her fingers together behind her back.  If her father were only here — for an hour, for a moment!  Or if, in the world beyond sight and hearing, he could somehow get a message to her!

At this moment a bell, somewhere in the deeps of the house, jangled, and she heard the old butler moving through the hall to the door.  The other servants had been dismissed for the night, and her aunt on the preliminaries of this marriage was in Paris.

A moment later the butler appeared with a card on his tray.  It was a card newly engraved in some English shop and bore the name “Dr. Tsan-Sgam.”  The girl stood for a moment puzzled at the queer name, and then the memory of the strange outlandish human creatures, from the ends of the world, who used sometimes to visit her father, in the old time, returned, and with it there came a sudden upward sweep of the heart — was there an answer to her longing, somehow, incredibly on the way!