She looked at the fire for some time without replying.  She stood with one foot on the fender.

“I thought I did when I married him,” she said at last.  “I thought I did when he left me.”

“And now?”

She turned her golden eyes full on me.  It is a disconcerting trick of hers at any time, because her eyes are at once wistful and compelling; but on this occasion it was startling.  They held mine for some seconds, and I caught in them a glimpse of the hieroglyphic of the woman’s soul.  Then she turned her head slowly and looked again into the fire.

“Now?” she echoed.  “Many things have happened between then and now.  If he is alive and I go to him, I’ll try to think again that I love him.  It will be the only way.  It will save me from playing hell with my life.”

“I am glad you see your relations to Dale in that light,” said I.

“I wasn’t thinking of Dale,” she said calmly.

“Of what, then, if I may ask without impertinence?”

She broke into a laugh which ended in a sigh, and then swung her splendid frame away from the fireplace and walked backwards and forwards, her figure swaying and her arms flung about in unrestrained gestures.

“You are quite right,” she said, with an odd note of hardness in her voice.  “You’re quite right in what you said the other day—­that it was high time I went back to my husband.  I pray God he is not dead.  I have a feeling that he isn’t.  He can’t be.  I count on you to find him and ask him to meet me.  It would be better than writing.  I don’t know what to say when I have a pen in my hand.  You must find him and speak to him and send me a wire and I’ll come straight away to any part of the earth.  Or would you like me to come with you and help you find him?  But no; that’s idiotic.  Forget that I have said it.  I’m a fool.  But he must be found.  He must, he must!”

She paused in her swinging about the room for which I was sorry, as her panther-in-a-cage movements were exceedingly beautiful, and she gazed at me with a tragic air, wringing her hands.  I was puzzled to find an adequate reason for this sudden emotional outburst.  Hitherto she had accepted the prospect of a resumption of married life with a fatalistic calm.  Now when the man is either dead or has vanished into space, she pins all her hopes of happiness on finding him.  And why had her salvation from destruction nothing to do with Dale?  There is obviously another range of emotions at work beneath it all; but what their nature is baffles me.  Although I contemplate with equanimity my little corner in the Garden of Prosperpine, and with indifference this common lodging-house of earth, and although I view mundane affairs with the same fine, calm, philosophic, satirical eye as if I were already a disembodied spirit, yet I do not like to be baffled.  It makes me angry.  But during this interview with Lola Brandt I had not time to be angry.  I am angry now.  In fact I am in a condition bordering on that of a mad dog.  If Rogers came and disturbed me now, as I am writing, I would bite him.  But I will set calmly down the story of this appalling afternoon.