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ridicule under their surfaces. Ysobel laughed softly.

“You forget only one thing, sir,” she said. “I do not burn. I wonder if I shall ever burn again. You do not carry a torch for me—and I hoped you did. I came this morning to see if you did. And I have heard your words so often and so often in Paris and Cordova. I am tired of these words that never change. Is there some book with which aspiring lovers instruct themselves? The Spanish men say the same things, but their gestures are more practiced, and so a little more convincing. You have much to learn.”

She was silent. Henry looked at the floor. His amazement had raised a fog of dullness in his brain.

“I took Panama for you,” he said plaintively.

“Ah—yesterday I hoped you did. Yesterday I dreamed you had, but to-day— I am sorry.” She spoke softly and very sadly.

“When I heard of you and your blustering up and down the ocean, I thought of you, somehow, as the one realist on an earth of vacillation. I dreamed that you would come to me one day, armed with a transcendent, silent lust, and force my body with brutality. I craved a wordless, reasonless brutality. The long thought of it bore me up when I was paraded by my husband. He did not love me. He was flattered with the thought that I loved him. It gave him importance and charm in his own eyes, neither of which were his. He would take me through the streets and his eyes would say, ‘See what I have married!’ No ordinary man could