figure of his late neighbour. She was tall and slight with a firm light walk, but as she went down the aisle made by two long dining-tables the ship rolled gently, and she put out her pale brown hands here and there touching a chair back.

Proceeding with his dinner, which had as yet only reached the second course, Westenra reflected that it would be difficult for any woman, even with a bet to win, to give herself and her affairs away more thoroughly in a short space of time than his late neighbour had done.

"With both hands she did it--and her tongue," he mused cynically. "In no longer a time than it took to dine off a brandy-and-soda and the outline of a sardine!"

After sitting next to her for a matter of twenty minutes he knew all there was to be known of her tastes, her profession, her temperament, her habits. She had travelled, she wrote for the newspapers,--sensational stuff probably, her head was too small for a thinker's head,--she was entirely modern, cursed with nerves, restlessness, and dissatisfaction; she was unreserved, unreposeful, uncontrolled, undisciplined; she drank, she smoked. He really could not think of anything about her, except her charming voice, which of course she could not help, that was not in violent opposition to his every idea of what a woman should be, and the fact filled him with resentment born of a kind of chivalrous discontent that any woman should be so far from the ideal standard. He entirely withdrew his earlier supposition that she was a woman of the world, in spite of the evidence of travel and experience.

"A woman of her type could never contend with any kind of social life. The way she let that Jew draw her was childish."

At that moment something happened that thrilled through his nerves and veins like an electric shock, and left him mentally stunned.

The woman of whom he had been thinking was coming back down the long saloon, her delicate hands put out to the chair backs in the same little frond-like movement as before. For the first time he saw her face clear and full; and he did not have to look twice to recognise it. Though it had always eluded his memory in waking hours he knew it now that he saw it as well as his own. It was the face of the woman he had dreamed of for years. He knew her hair, her eyes, her mouth, the grey gown she had on, the deep collar of fine lace ivoried by age that turned away from the base of a long throat that had fine ivory tints of its own. He even knew the necklace of luminous grey-green beads that swung to her waist. The wistfulness of the Irishry that he remembered so well lurked elusively about her eyes and mouth, and the touch of Orientalism was there too, though it was hard to tell of what it came, for if her hair was black and her skin Arab-pale, her sad eyes were not dark but of a curious smoky blue. As she came nearer she looked straight at him, her glance for a moment seeming to rest in his, and he saw that like the eyes of many clever people hers possessed a slight defect; they were different in shape and expression; one seemed to be long and sleepy and almost cynical looking, the other, rounder, held an eager inquiring glance that suggested great vitality and ardour. This was Westenra's fleeting impression, there was no time for more, and he was almost too aghast for clear thought; but a glance of his eye went a good deal further than most people's, and in this instance his vision was sharpened by the strange circumstances of his dream.

It appeared that she had come back to her seat to fetch a little silk bag of the kind that women were then using to carry about their handkerchiefs and purses. She spoke to no one, only leaned over the back of her seat, took her bag and went away, and it was all over in two or three seconds. But in those few seconds a man's life had been changed. The world would never look the same again to Garrett Westenra. Obliged to add to all his scornful opinions of the woman who had sat next to him outraging his ideals, the astounding knowledge that she was the woman of his dreams, the living presentment of the vision that had for years so mystically haunted his life, he was shaken to the Celtic roots of him. He felt as a man feels who has lost something precious and irreplaceable. Something was broken and gone from his life. The beautiful spun-glass globe of illusion he had carried so secretly was shattered in the dust. In that moment of bitter realisation he was not a surgeon and scientist from New York, but a primitive man from Ireland keening in silence for a nameless sorrow. The desert grief of his race welled up from the depths of him, and the taste of his waters was as the taste of the waters of Marah.

There were few people on deck. The wind was chill, and the stars burned with the brilliant sapphire pallor of electric light. There was a special spot where Westenra always stood to smoke, because it gave him a leaning place against the rail where he could command the length of the deck, and yet get an uninterrupted view of the grey waves with their pale sea palaces. Close beside him in a canvas-sheltered corner stood his deck chair. He lit a cigar, but he might have been smoking seaweed for all the aroma there was in it for him. Abstractedly he stared at the phosphorescent waves, but his attention was on the door of the companion-way, and presently, as he had felt sure she would, the woman in grey came through it with her swaying movements and her hands put out a little. She had wrapped herself in a long silky cloak that gleamed in the starlight, and as she strayed up and down the deck like a grey ghost, the wind took hold of it and flicked it about her making it crack like a silken sail. It took fronds of her hair too and made them into lashes that beat her face and blew above her head. She laughed a little to herself as she was blown this way and that, and for the first time that night she pleased Westenra, for he loved the wind, and it seemed to him that she loved it too. He stood very still listening to the tap-tapping of her heels, thinking of--

"Dear, were your footsteps fast or slow...?"

and of how long he had listened in office and hospital for the sound of a woman's feet coming towards him. He remembered the bare broken feet of the woman in his dream, though he had always dimly recognised that the mud and blood were symbolical of the rough paths she had walked. These that tapped the deck near him were daintily shod in grey suède, but from her own telling they had strayed in far places of the earth and echoed in lonely spots before they came his way, as they were coming now. Would they halt when they reached him? Resentful, antagonistic, and disillusioned as he was, something in his fatalistic Irish nature responded, some bird sang in a pale green palace when she stood still beside him, and spoke:

"Do you think I might sit in this nice sheltered corner?" She looked at the chair and then at him, with a boyish bon camarade smile that banished all the sadness and shadows from her face.

"I 'm sure you might--please do."

He moved forward swiftly and arranged the chair for her. She sat down, and as he did not move away began to talk to him in the same friendly easy way as she had used to the Jew, and he found himself, like the Jew, answering her if not eagerly at least with interest. However they touched only on generalities. She did not tell him nearly so