"I said I did not know if I should stay to dinner as a matter of course, but I thanked her. We drifted into conversation and she gave a very clever impression of being a thorough woman of the world. She was not, of course. She was one of those unfortunate beings who are trained in all the arts of life and who become adepts in all those accomplishments which men take entirely for granted, and who are permitted to grow up imagining men are paladins. And when they marry they experience a shock from which they never recover. Being married is such a different affair from looking after your father's house. When I mentioned my errand, she said her mother and the widowed aunt were at Torquay. Her plain features were suffused with emotion when she mentioned the death of her uncle. She had been his favourite niece. He always paid them a brief visit when he came to London. Very brief. He had a great many people to see in town. Only last year he had given her a set of pearls. And Madame Kinaitsky was so young—it was tragic. The pater had gone over and met her in Paris and she would live with them in future. She stopped in the middle of this and looked at me.
"'You met her, of course, out there?' she asked.
"'Oh, dear no,' I said. "I am only a very casual acquaintance, you understand. I happened to be on the spot, and the very fact that I was not a regular friend gave your uncle the idea that his papers, whatever they are, would be safer with me. I was only too pleased to be of service. You see,' I went on, 'your uncle knew a friend of mine, and so....
"'A friend of yours?' she queried.
"'Yes, a business friend. Your uncle helped him and his daughter. It was the daughter I knew particularly.'
"'Was she nice?' she demanded, eagerly. 'I mean, was she worthy of his help? He was so good. He helped everybody. There is an orphanage in Saloniki which he supported—oh, most generously. And he asked nothing in return. Oh!' she exclaimed, 'when I think of his life, always thinking of others and doing good, and how at last he found happiness for himself, and then this....' and she gazed out of the window at the old gentleman, who was in trouble with his yacht, which had capsized just beyond walking-stick reach. 'It was like him to trust a stranger,' she murmured.
"'He was good enough to make use of me because I was an Englishman,' I replied.
"'And that was like him, too,' she returned, kindling again. 'It was a great grief to him that business prevented him from living with us here in Hampstead. He loved the English ways. He used to say in joke that he would certainly marry an English wife if he could induce any of them to marry him. But of course he met his fate. He wrote hoping we would love her. We shall do that, of course, but——' she looked out again at the old gentleman who had found a small boy volunteer to paddle out, bare-legged, to salve the yacht.
"'But what?' I asked.
"'She will marry again,' Miss Kinaitsky remarked in a low tone. 'I am positive. I do not see how we can blame her. She submitted to the arrangement. But she did not love him. We feel it, because he spoke of her in such terms ... it was almost adoration. There was never any other woman for him....'
"A silence fell between us because, as you can easily imagine, I had nothing to offer commensurate with the extraordinary exaltation of her mood. It was plain enough that to a woman like her love could not possibly be what I had conceived it. To her it was a divine flame through which she would discern the transfigured features of her beloved. To her it was a supreme sacrament administered in a sacred chamber whence had been shut out all the evil which impregnates the heart of man. And I sat there wondering. When I left that sumptuous and smoothly running mansion and walked out across the Heath in the dusk toward the Spaniards Inn, I was still wondering whether each of us could be right. And I wonder still. For if it were true that love were what she and her kind imagine it to be, then I had never seen it. To me it had been nothing so transcendentally easy as that. To me it had been an obscure commotion, an enigmatic storm on which the human soul, with its drogue of inherited sorrows, was flung on its beam ends, stove in and dismasted, while beyond, far off, there shone a faint light, the flash of a derisive smile, flashing and then suddenly going out. And even now, in the mists of the accumulating years, I wonder still."
For the last time Mr. Spenlove paused, and stepping out to the rail, he stood there, with his back to the men who had listened to his story, silhouetted against the first pale flush of the dawn, looking away to the horizon where could be seen a tiny light, shrouded to point straight toward them, flashing once, twice, with mysterious caution, and then going out.