"I wouldn’t," he said fervently. "I am so curious and interested in what is hidden that I--"

"Don’t," she cried out, half in anger, "you are so young, so full of the joy of life, why do you speak of death? Earth must be very sweet to you yet."

"So it is," he assented, quickly; "and there are always ambitions here."

"Ah, yes!" she said, with the relief of one whose feet have found firm ground. "Our ambitions. What do you want?"

He sat up very straight, and his eyes seemed to grow bluer. He loved his profession.

"I want to be as fine as Ravenhill first. You have seen his Hamlet, and know what that means. I want to be his equal and then—​alone. Then—​but one want at a time is enough, if you mean to achieve it. What do you want?"

She had wanted many things. Her wants had formed the lever by which the gods had worked their irony upon her; and her portion had been dead sea-apples. So now she "went softly under the stars," and voiced no want. But oh! to write something good—​not the petty drivel of Women and Emancipation—​but something alive and true, so that Meredith, and Kipling, and Hardy would some day take her by the hand and greet her "comrade." Oh! to fill in her life with work, work, work, work, noble work, so that there was never a gap left to remember in. O! for rest from the torment of memory and an empty heart.

Did she tell him these things, or did he simply understand? She never remembered afterwards, but she knew that he knew, on that sweet, tropical summer night.

They sat late talking.

The hostess gave her into his charge, and, like all the other guests, they went away in a ricksha, with the bells tinkling and the Zulu boy’s white suit gleaming in the vapoury, delicate light shed by a slender fragment of moon and a star-splashed sky.

"Doesn’t it appal you sometimes to think how much that little fragment of moon knows about you?" she asked. "She has seen all one’s sins and all one’s sufferings--"

"And knows the reason for both," he said quietly.

She shivered, and her little lonely hands, lying on the ricksha coverlet like white flowers, trembled, so that he took them up and held them.

"Some day she will see you happy, too," he said, "for she is a very tender old moon."

And when Dolores would have laughed her little bitter laugh at the thought of happiness, no sound would come, for the bitterness was all gone, and a great peace had fallen on her heart.

At her door he spoke of a reception which was to be given the next night to a famous singer who was visiting Natal. They were both going to the reception, but he would be late, he said. He was "on" in the last act of Romeo and Juliet. Would she keep him a dance if there was any dancing afterwards? She promised.

When the next night came he was very late, but he came straight to her, and the peace within her deepened as she felt his arm about her.

She did not look up at him, for his eyes had grown so deeply, fiercely blue, that she dared not meet them there, before all the world.

While they danced, and all too soon, the music swerved suddenly from the waltz into "God Save the Queen," and their evening was over. He was fain to take her to the cloak-room, where a woman friend waited; but in the shadow of the doorway he spoke.

"I find I want something else, besides fame. Will you give it to me, you sweet, sad woman?"

She could not speak, her heart was in her throat; but the droop had gone from her lips, and her eyes were shining in the dark like velvet stars.

"When may I come to you! To-morrow?"

Her heart urged yes, but her brain remembered that to-morrow she must interview the famous singer. She would give it up, she thought swiftly, and let her newspaper go. But no! Perhaps, if she denied herself for a few short hours, the gods would remember, and make her reward the sweeter. She must make some sacrifice for this great happiness.

"No; Wednesday," she whispered, and quickly, for fear she should revoke:

"Good-night."