His lip trembled a little.  There was a strange melancholy in his eyes, belying the passion and rapture of his words.

In all their days together she had never seen him in this mood.  She had heard him storm about things at times, had watched his big impulses working; had drawn the thunder from his clouds; but there was something moving in him now which she had never seen before.  Perhaps it was only a passing phase, even a moment’s mood, but it made a strange impression on her.  It was remembered by them both long after, when life had scattered its vicissitudes before their stumbling feet and they had passed through flood and fire.

She drew back and looked at him steadily, reflectively, and with an element of surprise in her searching look.  She had never thought him gifted with perception or insight, though he had eloquence and an eye for broad effects.  She had thought him curiously ignorant of human nature, born to be deceived, full of child-like illusions, never understanding the real facts of life, save in the way of business—­and politics.  Women he never seemed by a single phrase or word to understand, and yet now he startled her with a sudden revelation and insight of which she had not thought him capable.

“If you had lived a thousand years ago you would have had a thousand lovers.  Perhaps you did—­who knows! . . .  And now you come down through the centuries purified by Time—­”

The words slowly repeated themselves in her brain.  Many and many a time she had imagined herself as having lived centuries ago, and again and again in her sleep these imaginings had reflected themselves in wild dreams of her far past—­once as a priestess of Isis, once as a Slavonian queen, once as a peasant in Syria, and many times as a courtezan of Alexandria or Athens—­many times as that:  one of the gifted, beautiful, wonderful women whose houses were the centres of culture, influence, and power.  She had imagined herself, against her will, as one of these women, such as Cleopatra, for whom the world were well lost; and who, at last, having squeezed the orange dry, but while yet the sun was coming towards noon, in scorn of Life and Time had left the precincts of the cheerful day without a lingering look....  Often and often such dreams, to her anger and confusion, had haunted her, even before she was married; and she had been alternately humiliated and fascinated by them.  Years ago she had told Ian Stafford of one of the dreams of a past life—­that she was a slave in Athens who saved her people by singing to the Tyrant; and Ian had made her sing to him, in a voice quite in keeping with her personality, delicate and fine and wonderfully high in its range, bird-like in its quality, with trills like a lark—­a little meretricious but captivating.  He had also written for her two verses which were as sharp and clear in her mind as the letter he wrote when she had thrown him over so dishonourably: 

“Your voice I knew, its cadences and trill;
It stilled the tumult and the overthrow
When Athens trembled to the people’s will;
I knew it—­’twas a thousand years ago.