“Most people think to be complex is to be great,” I objected.

She shook her head.  “That is quite a mistake,” she answered.  “Great natures are simple, and relatively predictable, since their motives balance one another justly.  Small natures are complex, and hard to predict, because small passions, small jealousies, small discords and perturbations come in at all moments, and override for a time the permanent underlying factors of character.  Great natures, good or bad, are equably poised; small natures let petty motives intervene to upset their balance.”

“Then you knew I would come,” I exclaimed, half pleased to find I belonged inferentially to her higher category.

Her eyes beamed on me with a beautiful light.  “Knew you would come?  Oh, yes.  I begged you not to come; but I felt sure you were too deeply in earnest to obey me.  I asked a friend in Cape Town to telegraph your arrival; and almost ever since the telegram reached me I have been expecting you and awaiting you.”

“So you believed in me?”

“Implicitly—­as you in me.  That is the worst of it, Hubert.  If you did not believe in me, I could have told you all—­and then, you would have left me.  But, as it is, you know all—­and yet, you want to cling to me.”

“You know I know all—­because Sebastian told me?”

“Yes; and I think I even know how you answered him.”

“How?”

She paused.  The calm smile lighted up her face once more.  Then she drew out a pencil.  “You think life must lack plot-interest for me,” she began, slowly, “because, with certain natures, I can partially guess beforehand what is coming.  But have you not observed that, in reading a novel, part of the pleasure you feel arises from your conscious anticipation of the end, and your satisfaction in seeing that you anticipated correctly?  Or part, sometimes, from the occasional unexpectedness of the real denouement?  Well, life is like that.  I enjoy observing my successes, and, in a way, my failures.  Let me show you what I mean.  I think I know what you said to Sebastian—­not the words, of course, but the purport; and I will write it down now for you.  Set down your version, too.  And then we will compare them.”

It was a crucial test.  We both wrote for a minute or two.  Somehow, in Hilda’s presence, I forgot at once the strangeness of the scene, the weird oddity of the moment.  That sombre plain disappeared for me.  I was only aware that I was with Hilda once more—­and therefore in Paradise.  Pison and Gihon watered the desolate land.  Whatever she did seemed to me supremely right.  If she had proposed to me to begin a ponderous work on Medical Jurisprudence, under the shadow of the big rock, I should have begun it incontinently.

She handed me her slip of paper; I took it and read:  “Sebastian told you I was Dr. Yorke-Bannerman’s daughter.  And you answered, ‘If so, Yorke-Bannerman was innocent, and you are the poisoner.’  Is not that correct?”