“With all my will, but much against my heart,
We two now part. 
My very Dear,
Our solace is the sad road lies so clear. . . 
Go thou to East, I West. 
We will not say
There’s any hope, it is so far away. . .”

He read the verses with a smile of quiet enjoyment, saying, when he had finished: 

“A really moving and intimate piece of work.  I wonder what their story was—­a hopeless love, of course.  An affaire—­an ’episode’—­London ladies now call such things.”

“You find London has changed much since you went away—­in three years only?” she asked.

“Three years—­why, it’s an eternity, or a minute, as you are obliged to live it.  In penal servitude it is centuries, in the Appian Way of pleasure it is a sunrise moment.  Actual time has nothing to do with the clock.”

She looked up to the little gold-lacquered clock on the mantel-piece.  “See, it is going to strike,” she said.  As she spoke, the little silver hammer softly struck.  “That is the clock-time, but what time is it really—­for you, for instance?”

“In Elysium there is no time,” he murmured with a gallantry so intentionally obvious and artificial that her pulses beat with anger.

“It is wonderful, then, how you managed the dinner-hour so exactly.  You did not miss it by a fraction.”

“It is only when you enter Elysium that there is no time.  It was eight o’clock when I arrived—­by the world’s time.  Since then I have been dead to time—­and the world.”

“You do not suggest that you are in heaven?” she asked, ironically.

“Nothing so extreme as that.  All extremes are violent.”

“Ah, the middle place—­then you are in purgatory?”

“But what should you be doing in purgatory?  Or have you only come with a drop of water to cool the tongue of Dives?” His voice trailed along so coolly that it incensed her further.

“Certainly Dives’ tongue is blistering,” she said with great effort to still the raging tumult within her.  “Yet I would not cool it if I could.”

Suddenly the anger seemed to die out of her, and she looked at him as she did in the days before Rudyard Byng came across her path—­eagerly, childishly, eloquently, inquiringly.  He was the one man who satisfied the intellectual and temperamental side of her; and he had taught her more than any one else in the world.  She realized that she had “Tossed him violently like a ball into a far country,” and that she had not now a vestige of power over him—­either of his senses or his mind; that he was master of the situation.  But was it so that there was a man whose senses could not be touched when all else failed?  She was very woman, eager for the power which she had lost, and power was hard to get—­by what devious ways had she travelled to find it!