didn't catch them, they are lost words.... She opened a door.

"In there she suddenly turned on me, and shook my arm. And a sudden, queer darkness about her face made me wonder if she was angry.

"'Oh, you are so inevitable, aren't you!' she cried, but the exclamation ended so surprisingly in the air, somehow so high up in the air, that I've never yet been able to bring it definitely down to earth and discover its meaning; unless it was that—I don't know.... She was so strange, so different from the other women who had filled and emptied one's life, and it was difficult to tell her moods from her emotions. But there was nothing spurious nor counterfeit about her, she was not unreal, she wasn't even the closely-knit but far away dream that beautiful women sometimes become in those terrifying, intimate moments. She was the most essentially feminine woman that I've ever met, she was so real.... That white oval face with the large, so large and so articulate eyes, set in a mass of soft black Southern hair which I myself had unpinned and let fall over her shoulders despite a shy murmur from her—why, desire is a cheap word to express the passion to possess that, the living symbol of the loveliest woman of all time! Yes, yes, I was supremely ridiculous. I still am....

"A second or a century later, at the end of a long, long silence, for me an infinity of happiness, she moved her head away from me and asked me to light her a cigarette. I gave it to her, and waited. I knew so well, you see, what was coming. I had been watching her, I had made a feast of all the movements of that amazing face. It was a sad face, wonderfully alive, but sad; and its sadness became fixed, her eyes were large and held no curiosity at all. I noticed the lack of curiosity in them, because one is so used to meeting it in women—they want to find out! But she, perhaps, in her splendid conceit, had found out, she knew, and she was sad—had she not said downstairs that she knew? I didn't care then whether she knew or not, for then life was before me, the present and the future were in exquisite certainty; but now, as I waited and watched her draw her cigarette, I looked back on that future, and was really terrified of the present. There are moments of ice-clear sanity in all of us—you must know those moments?—when you realise with helpless vividness what you can and what you cannot do, what you simply cannot alter. And so with this moment and this woman; she was inexorable, I could not alter her, I could do nothing but wait—for the epilogue to that prelude played long ago downstairs, when she had put her hands on my shoulders and told me that she was warning me....

"'But perhaps you will think me very vain?' she asked at last, very quietly.

"'Because you are thinking you will make me wretched by what you are going to say?'

"'Oh, you are too quick!' she murmured. And she raised her head on her elbow and looked at me.

"'Dear Noël Anson,' she said, 'our lives go different ways. To-day we had never met, and to-morrow it must be as though we had never met. For life is not a romance, it is a reality, and it is much stronger than our—inclinations? And even if I loved you it would be the same, I should be saying what I am saying now, because in me there is something much stronger than love, much more inevitable.... Please, you must believe me, it will hurt me if you do not believe me. I am not playing any more. I do not play with memories of crushed orchids, because it is only fools who think there is no pleasure in being serious ... just sometimes.'

"'It is no use for me to say any more,' she said, 'because if you like me very much then, anyway, you will be bitter about me—and if you do not like me very much then you will only think me (how is it?) an odd sort of woman.... I command you, and I put you on your honour to obey, that when you leave this house you will go into the brougham waiting for you without looking to see the number of the house, nor the name of the street, so that you will never see me again, you man.... But it is now very, very late, you must go, Don Noël, you must go! And take with you my blessings—Adieu!'

"But I can only repeat her words to you barely and crudely. I can't hope to give you the tragic gesture of impotence in her voice, and the way her voice grew lighter and lighter until it seemed to become part of the air, as impalpable, as mysterious. And at the end her voice had died down to almost less than a whisper, her 'adieu' had fainted between her tongue and her lips, it was only a wisp of a dying word. It was strangely as though she were rehearsing something she might have to say sometime.... She was only rehearsing. I waited.

"'Oh, but isn't that enough!' she almost cried, suddenly. 'Have I not done it quite, quite well, or do you want me to think of something else—something more ... more dramatic?'

"'Please, please do make it easy for me, Don Noël—do go away, please!' she begged. 'This is so difficult, so much more difficult than I.... It is not a tragedy, this, remember! It is an incident, and the incident is finished, that's all. Don't please let me make a tragedy of it—by apologising! You see, my Noël, I am so weak, so weak. I feel such a bad woman, such a brute.... And you can never understand why, never.... Forgive me, and go!'

"Her very last word was almost brutal in its defined meaning, it held no uncertainty; but I didn't move at that moment. I remembered that I did not know her name.

"'A few moments ago, before you spoke, I had a dream,' I said. 'And in my dream I was told that you would tell me your name, the name that will explain the initials under the coronet on your hairbrushes. The adventure would not have been so complete without a coronet, so I looked to see if one was there, and behold! it was there. I am such a snob, I would like to know your name.... And then I would forget it.'

"'That was a false dream,' she said. 'You will not know my name, you will not know where this house is, you will not know anything. Don Noël, you will be an English gentleman of the kind we find in books, you will not remember or know anything that I do not wish. You will not look at the number of the house, nor at the name of the street. That is my wish.'

"She was quite, quite cold. Just like a woman who has had a love affair which has lasted an eternity but cannot outlast another second. How wise she was to let me see that—oh, well, anti-climax! She knew that men do not fall of their own accord from great heights down to Mother Earth, they must be pushed over—ever so gently, gently.

"'It is getting light,' she murmured.

"But as I rose she confessed her affectation; she threw her arms round my neck and brought my face close to hers.

"'You fool man!' she said. 'Why do you hurt yourself and me? Why did you just say that this was an adventure? This has not been an adventure, it has been a love-affair.... And always remember that I asked you to forgive me. Always.'

"When I was at the door I had to turn round. I had feared this moment of going, and I had made up my mind to go quickly and be done with it. But I make a bad actor, and artistic effects can go to the devil for all I care. With my hand on the knob I had to turn round.

"'I can't go like this,' I said. And I walked back across the room, and looked down on her.

"'I can't. It seems wrong,' I said.

"'Perhaps, then, it was not worth it?' she asked, so tentatively!

"'It will always have been worth it.... But there is something missing, isn't there?'

"'But, of course, Don Noël! There is much missing, for it is an unfinished romance which will never be