THROUGHOUT the month of August, while drawn blinds in all the handsome windows of Prince’s Gate announced that Kensington was at the seaside or on the continent, Miss Verinder enjoyed the absolute freedom of a sitting-room and a bedroom at the Langham Hotel. Mr. Dyke did not lodge in Portland Place, and the hotel porters scarcely knew him by sight. He and his Emmie were never seen together at the west-end of the town. If he appeared anywhere in public he was alone. Although Emmie might not be very far off, she never disclosed herself. She retired into the modest ill-lit background—as on the occasion of his lecture at the hall in Wigmore Street, where she sat in her dim corner shooting arrows of love from misty eyes as she watched him step upon the platform, and trembling with pride and joy as she listened to what the noble chairman said about him. He belonged to her, “this wonderful explorer, this man of resource as limitless as his courage, this man who, alone and unaided, has gone into the dark places of the world, tearing the veil from nature’s face and making foot-paths through the unknown,”—he belonged to her, but fate had ordained that she must possess her property in secret and not openly claim it as her very own. He too understood that the wide public need not be told everything, and he showed a delicate reserve in spite of his passion. As was said by one of the very few people who knew anything about them: on the whole they were decent in their indecency.

To use a phrase much favoured and commonly used at this epoch, life had become a fairy tale to Miss Verinder. It seemed to her that the first sight of Anthony Dyke had awakened her from a sleep of death; that then he had breathed fire into her, and that now he was filling her with purpose and power. He was moreover the key to all enigmas and the magical expounder of the commonplace. Nothing tired her, nothing bored her; everything, however drab and cold till now, had light and warmth and colour in it. Also nearly everything was new. She rode with him in hansom cabs, was hugged by him in delightful smoky compartments of the underground railway, spent whole days with him on the eastern side of the Mansion House; seeing in flashes the Monument, the Tower and the new Bridge, the Commercial Road, the docks—the places she had heard about but never seen before. These, with glimpses of the river, the rattle of the city traffic, the roar of trains rolling through iron bridges above crowded streets, made a new forceful world for her after the dignified repose of her old universe.

All this while he was making preparations for his departure, which could not be delayed after the middle of September, and his business in the city and beyond the city concerned the ship that was to take him to South America and the cargo it would carry. She felt elation, pride, and overwhelming interest as she trotted by his side, or a little behind him; dodging through the thronged streets, dashing down dark little courts, and in and out of such queer offices, where among dust and gloom one seemed to smell sea breezes and have visions of distance and adventure. He walked so fast that she was always out of breath, but even this discomfort was pleasant since it came from him; she felt that romance and poetry were making her breathless, and not merely muscular effort. He left her sitting in outer rooms, and if the truth must be told, he sometimes forgot her, so absorbed did he become in the negotiations he was conducting. Once, after waiting for an incredible time, she looked down through a dirt-stained window into a narrow street near Tower Hill and saw him going away engrossed and gesticulating with two other men; and her heart almost ceased to beat as she thought it would be like this when he went from her for ever. He came back exultant, apologetic, her lover again now that the business had been completed, and swept her away with him for a belated three o’clock luncheon, a ravenously hungry meal in a strange tavern—the first of those queer repasts in queer places of which destiny decreed she was to eat so many. He drank her health, he touched her hand beneath the table, he looked sudden death at inoffensive strangers that he suspected of glancing at her with an admiration too patent to be respectful; he praised and thanked her for granting him her companionship and counsel, for giving him—as he said without the slightest intention of flippancy—her “moral support.”

His praise was music to her, sweet as the singing of birds, grand and voluminous as a cathedral organ; but she reproved him for the murder glare at those always well-meaning and now terrified young men.

“Because you like me,” she said, smiling at him, “you mustn’t fall into the mistake of supposing that other people see me with your eyes. Except you, no one has ever thought me worth looking at—or in any way out of the ordinary.”

“Emmie, why do you say that?” He stared at her in surprise, and his face grew troubled. “It’s not like you—not worthy. You should be above all that. You must know quite well”—and he said this softly but very firmly, with a kind of grateful solemn reverence—“that you are the most beautiful thing God ever created.”

“Oh, no,” she said, with one of her swift blushes, and in a voice of frightened confusion. “That’s utterly absurd—even for you to think. But, dear Tony, I am quite content if, as I say, in your eyes—”

“In all eyes,” he said loudly and almost angrily, administering a sharp slap to the table with his open hand. “Why pretend—why try to spoil my rapture? Emmie, my dearest, don’t do it. My lovely priceless girl, it—it hurts me”; and there was real pain in his tone.

She vowed both to herself and to him that she would not do it again. His illusion was ecstasy to her. Why should she try to shatter it in the name of dull stupid truth? Rather pray to heaven that he might continue thus divinely deluded.

Miss Verinder, then, was happy as well as entranced. She averted her gaze from the cloud represented by that ominous date of September Fifteen. She refused to look at it in her diary at the hotel or to notice its advancing shadow out of doors. Four more weeks, three more weeks—and then the end. She would not think of it, she could not think of it. Does the busy little gnat as it moves with a whir of tiny wings in the sunlight brood on the ephemeral nature of its joy or feel premonitions of the darkness and the frost which will close its brief day?

She knew that his plans were finally settled—cut-and-dried, as he said himself—and that nothing would change them. He was going to the Argentine Republic with a cargo in which, as she soon learned, he owned the largest share; he hoped that this venture might prove exceedingly profitable; and, immediately on its completion, he intended to make some mysterious kind of excursion to his old friends, the Andes—“a picnic,” as he described it; “a little trip on spec”; “just a lark.” Then, after this, he would be off to Australia and its deserts again. One of those governments wanted him. Then, when he had finished the governmental job, he would turn once more to big work—the noble work that, as he had hinted to Mr. Verinder, requires solid cash behind it.

Speaking of the preliminary commercial venture, he touched on this point.

“Emmie, my grave little judge, you mustn’t think me sordid and grasping when I chatter about pots and pans, and gas about fleecing the honest Argentinos. If I’m keen—and I am desperately keen—to get money, it isn’t for myself—it’s for what I feel my life-work”; and he laughed gaily. “Look here, old lady, you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. I’d stick at nothing to put myself in funds. The end justifies the means.” And he laughed again. “Don’t look frightened, you innocent angel. All I wish to imply is this: If Dyke is desired to find the South Pole on one of these long evenings—as Dyke intends to do, mark you, Emmeline of the dusky locks—well, he must have a bob or two in the bank.”

Immediately Miss Verinder offered him her own money, all of it, or as much of it as he felt he could make use of; but he told her that acceptance was quite impossible. He could never take a penny of her. Besides, as he explained, it was a duty of the public to support him, and he proposed to make them fulfil their duty. “If our little gamble turns up trumps, it may keep me going for two or three years. But the public must put up the stuff for the big thing. Emmie dear, I confess it’s a matter of pride with me. Dyke has done enough already to establish his title to public support. Why shouldn’t they back Dyke—as well as the other fellows? Ah, here we are. I shan’t keep you ten minutes here.”

They had been hurrying down a lane not far from Liverpool Street Station. Taking her by the elbow, he guided her through the doorway of a warehouse and up a narrow flight of stairs. The warehouse belonged to a Birmingham firm of gunmakers; and soon she was following Dyke and his business friends down more and more stairs, till she found herself in a cellar deep below the level of the roadway, where a shooting-gallery, perhaps twenty-five yards long, had been contrived for testing fire-arms. Dyke, very gay and jovial, chaffing black-coated managers or partners and slapping on the back a stout workman in an apron, selected from hundreds of rifles about a dozen, and took up position at the opening of the gallery. An assistant with black hands and oil-stained face began to load the weapons, and the man in the apron handed them one after another to Dyke. The whole cellar was well lit with electric light, which its whitewashed walls reflected harshly. One saw the vaulted entrance in front of Dyke, and a white target against a brown bank at the far-end.

“How much earth have you got there behind the disc?”

“Three feet—quite three feet.”

“All right”; and Dyke loosed off.

The noise was appalling. In that confined space each discharge made a crash and roar as of a thunder-storm; the walls seemed to be shaking as well as echoing; one felt that the building overhead must fall and one would be buried alive. They were repeating rifles—clumsy and poor machines if compared with the magazine rifle of to-day; but Dyke fired them so rapidly that he might have been working a mitrailleuse. Miss Verinder felt that the top of her head had gone, that the drums of her ears had split, that she was suffocating by the sulphurous fumes of the exploded powder; but all the while she was proudly watching, proudly admiring him.

He was a younger Anthony now, the shooter of big game, out in Africa; bringing his gun to his shoulder in one motion so swift that it was there before you saw it begin to come up; standing firmly planted on his legs, with his hat on the back of his head, his eye intent, blazing away under conditions where a miss means death.

“There. Thank you”; and handing back his smoking rifle, he began very carefully to examine each one that he had fired.

“Well,” said the stout assistant, with a complaisant grin, “I never see anything like it. You don’t fiddle about—you don’t shilly-shally, sir. No, my word, you don’t.”

Dyke gave him another slap on the back, laughed, and spoke in the frank exulting tone of a schoolboy who brags so simply that what he says does not sound vain-glorious. “I was taught to be nippy, old chap, by shooting at elephants on the charge. I never had any lessons at the rifle-butts—with a marker and a flag. But I was hurrying now because I have another appointment”; and he turned to one of the gentlemen in black coats. “Yes, they’re all right. Yes, I pass that lot. Two hundred and fifty, aren’t they? Come along.”

“That was a very noisy performance,” said Emmeline, when they were out in the street again.

“Was it?” he said carelessly. “I suppose it was. I say, I’m behind time. We must leg it, darling.”

He did not apologize for having nearly deafened her; it never occurred to him that anybody could be upset by the pleasantly familiar racket of fire-arms. Nor did he ever notice that he walked much too fast for her—although he bowed like a Spanish hidalgo as he stood aside for her to pass through chop-house doors, handed her into hansom cabs as if she were a princess, and often looked at her across soiled tablecloths with the eyes of a mediÆval knight kneeling before the shrine of his patron saint. And perhaps Miss Verinder’s most exquisite bliss lay in her recognition of the fact that, beyond thinking her the loveliest of created things, beyond thinking her his counsellor and moral supporter, he instinctively regarded her as a comrade and a pal. Merely for dashing about the city, there was not a man in the world—and, scattered about the earth, there were, as she knew, many men for whom he had a great tenderness—there was not one that he would have preferred as companion to his staunchly trotting breathless little Emmie.

One day she met the captain of the ship on which Dyke was to sail, and the three of them had a delightful intimate luncheon in a remarkable eating-house with low beamed ceilings, panelled walls, and partitions surrounding each of the tables—a place, it was said, exactly the same as it had been in the time of Mr. Pickwick and little changed since the time of Dr. Johnson. It was hot, full of loud voices and oppressive kitchen smells; but Miss Verinder ate with appetite, being astonished to discover the charm afforded by grilled steak, tomatoes, and Worcestershire sauce, when you happen to be very hungry as well as very much in love. She liked Captain Cairns, a short but enormously strong man of fifty, with grizzled beard, and face and hands the colour of the woodwork that perhaps had seen Dr. Johnson and faithful Boswell. Captain Cairns inspired confidence; her Anthony would be safe with him. She was pleased, moreover, to observe his profound regard and admiration, when he spoke of Dyke’s famous deeds.

“One of my oldest and loyalest friends,” Dyke himself had said of him.

“Oh, Miss Verinder,” said the captain, “it does make me that angry when folks cast doubt on his discoveries. Pack o’ silly stay-at-home fools. I saw a bit in the newspaper the other day actually sneering at what he’d seen with his own eyes—those pigmies at Patagonia, Tony—you know—and the remnants of them temples in the Andes. Has he ever said what isn’t true? Oh, it makes me fair mad, when they go on like that—in print, too”; and Captain Cairns grew warm in his genuine disgust and indignation. “Not fit to clean his boots, they aren’t.”

Miss Verinder said that the incredulity of Mr. Dyke’s critics had made her very angry also.

“What does it matter?” said Dyke grandly. “Wasn’t Columbus doubted? We’re prepared for that sort of thing. It all comes right—we get our due at long last. Calumny and suspicion, perhaps, as long as we’re alive, but a piece of sculpture and a brass plate, a tomb in St. Paul’s or the Abbey, when the last cruise is done.”

“Oh, don’t speak like that”; and Miss Verinder shivered.

The industrious city clerks did not linger over their meal; the room grew nearly empty; but Dyke and the captain sat smoking cigars and talking of the cargo. She listened with unabated interest and puffed at a cigarette—one of the queer Spanish cigarettes given to her by Dyke. To smoke was a new accomplishment, and she was not yet very good at it, coughing occasionally, and blowing out when she meant to suck in. But she gloried in it, because it seemed to bring her closer still to him.

Captain Cairns, it appeared, had himself a share in the cargo; and it appeared further that a small portion of the cargo was for Uruguay and not for the Argentine. This consisted of bicycles and bicycle parts.

Miss Verinder, deeply interested, asked if the fashionable craze for bicycling had really reached that distant land. She said she was amused by the thought of a fashion spreading so swiftly.

“Captain Cairns was amused too.” He laughed until he rolled about on his bench.

“Yes, miss,” he spluttered, “no mistake about it. Them Uruguayans want bicycles—mad for ’em—ready to give any money for ’em.”

“Then what a splendid idea—how clever to have thought of bicycles.”

“Yes, yes,” said the captain, still laughing immoderately. “His idea. It was you, Tony, as thought of it first. Yes—bicycles. Why, bless me, Miss Verinder, the Uruguayans will be bang in the fashion—like so many monkeys on wheels.” Then he slowly recovered composure. “You set me off, miss. Forgive me. I’m one who will have his joke.”

It was a little difficult to understand of what this particular joke consisted and she saw that her sweetheart, although he had smiled to begin with, now seemed troubled if not annoyed by the captain’s sense of humour. For a moment he looked contritely at his Emmie, as though about to apologize for something or explain something. But then he seemed to change his mind, and he soon broke up the little party and took her away.

They walked westward along Cheapside and Newgate Street, and on to Holborn Viaduct; and, as always, their progress was enlivened by occurrences, incidents, excitements, emotions. Whether starting from Cape Horn or the Bank of England, he could not take a walk without things happening. At the corner of a side street a young woman selling flowers offered him roses. He bought a bunch for his companion, gave the woman half-a-crown, and told her to keep the change. The woman, overwhelmed by this largesse, huskily asked heaven to bless him, and then burst into tears saying she had been there since seven in the morning and those were the very first flowers she had sold. Dyke, almost weeping himself, implored her to be calm, made her tell more of her circumstances, gave her a couple of sovereigns with some loose silver, and took off his hat in the most respectfully courteous of farewells.

As he walked on—very slowly for him—he spoke with sadness of the cruelly hard fate of many women at great centres of civilization, like this enormous labyrinth of London—women, who ought to be cared for and loved in the shelter of happy homes, out in the open street, snatching a doubtful livelihood from the caprices of the crowd. He said it broke his heart when he thought about it.

Soon ceasing to think about it, he talked of those detractors of his—the people who, like Mr. Verinder and fellow members at the club, spoke of “travellers’ tales,” “Baron Munchausen,” and so on.

“It’s all true, Emmie dear; every word that I have ever uttered or put down on paper. What dolts! Because they read at school that Patagonians are a large race of men, if you tell them of an older smaller race not quite extinct—And those temples, too! Huge masses of masonry welded to the cliffs and rocks”; and he waved his hand above his head, as if to indicate the vastness and grandeur of these sacred remains. “Well, I couldn’t bring them away with me, could I? I couldn’t prove their existence by carting them home to the Geographical Society in Saville Row. No, believe me, the Andes still holds marvellous secrets. Yes,” he added triumphantly. “One little secret I have here, in my pocket,” and he tapped his chest. Then he stopped suddenly. “By the way, we’ve done our work. Why shouldn’t I go there now?” And he smiled at her fondly while he brought out a notebook. “I spoke of the labyrinth of London. But you, as a born Londoner, ought to know your way about. Where’s Hatton Garden?”

Miss Verinder had to confess that she did not know.

“There’s a merchant there I want to see.” After consulting his notebook, he hailed a hansom cab, with the usual ceremony handed her into it, and followed her.

“Hatton Garden,” he called to the driver, and gave the number of the house he wished to visit.

“Hatton Garden! Did you say Hatton Garden?” asked the driver, in surprised tones, through the roof trap.

“Yes. Drive on,” said Dyke authoritatively.

The man drove on for perhaps fifty yards, and then pulled up his horse.

“Drive on,” said Dyke, again, opening the trap-door. “What have you stopped for?”

“You’ve arrived,” said the man.

“Is this Hatton Garden?” shouted Dyke, as he sprang out of the cab.

The man said yes, and Dyke exploded with terrible force.

“Then, you infernal scoundrel, what do you mean by luring me into your cab and defrauding me of a fare when I was in Hatton Garden already and I had only a few steps to walk?”

“You wasn’t in Hatton Garden,” said the man. “You was facing it. I did ask you and you yelled I was to get on. I thought you knew.”

“No, you didn’t. You thought I was a stranger—you thought, because I didn’t know all the twists and turns of your senseless town you’d fleece me and make a fool of me—” And continuing the explosion, increasing it even, he said he would not pay the fare, not one penny of it, and he had a great mind to pull the driver off his seat and break every bone in his body.

Miss Verinder begged that the man might be paid. Gasping bystanders distressed her, the wrath of Dyke had thrown her into a flutter. “For my sake, Tony, pay him and be done with it.”

“For your sake? But the principle of the thing, Emmie. Oh, very well”; and he spoke now calmly and grandly to the cab-driver. “Because this lady wishes it, because this lady has interceded for you, you shall have your shilling. You shall have your—” He was feeling in his trousers pockets. But there was nothing there. He had given all his money to the flower-seller.

Miss Verinder opened her purse, and paid the cab-driver—a little more than his exact fare, in order to remove a perhaps unfavourable impression. Of course the cabdriver could not be expected to understand Anthony’s noble but explosive nature as she did.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, linking her arm in that of her hero and giving it an affectionate pressure. “Please dismiss all that from your mind—for my sake.”

Thus, arm in arm, they crossed the threshold of “Cunlip and Company, dealers in precious stones.”

Dyke in a moment was smiling, like a child who in the midst of fearful tantrums is soothed by a magic word from the lips of governess or nursemaid.

“Now this will be fun,” he said, beaming at her. “You listen to everything that he says. Where’s Mr. Cunlip? I want to see him at once, if he can make it convenient.”

Mr. Cunlip, a small, dark, old man, received them in a dingy office behind his show-rooms on the ground floor. He seemed a little taken aback by Dyke’s breezy self-introduction and cordial greetings.

“Well, here I am at last—Dyke—Anthony Dyke, you know. That doesn’t impress you, eh?” And Mr. Dyke laughed good-humouredly. “Well, I’ll give you a name that will mean something to you. Pedro del Sarto! Ever heard of Pedro del Sarto? Of Buenos Ayres, you know.”

But, to Dyke’s slight discomfiture, the name aroused no immediate memories in Mr. Cunlip. It became necessary to give further details—such as that old Pedro was a tip-topper, a white man, one of Dyke’s best friends, that he had been over here in 1880 and had done business with Mr. Cunlip.

Then the dealer in precious stones at last remembered. “Oh, yes, to be sure. But I see so many gentlemen from Argentina. A Spanish gentleman, wasn’t he? Headquarters at Buenos Ayres, but connected with those gold mines at Cape Horn? Yes, I’ve placed him now. I hadn’t much business with him. I passed him on to the assay people over the road.”

“That’s the man,” said Dyke, beaming. “Well, you’ll recollect now that he wrote to you two years ago to say I’d call on you at the first opportunity.”

“Two years ago! First opportunity, what!”

“This is the first opportunity. I have been occupied in other parts of the world,” said Dyke, with a very modest air.

Mr. Cunlip then wished to know how he could avail himself of the opportunity, now that it had come, by being of service to Mr. Dyke.

“Something to show you,” said Dyke modestly.

He had brought from his waistcoat pocket a small envelope; he opened this, extracted a tiny packet of tissue paper, and after unfolding the paper, rolled out upon the top of a glass case what looked like five or six greenish pebbles, each about the size of a pea. Then he spoke in a tone that had changed from extreme modesty to almost aggressive triumph.

“What do you call those?”

Mr. Cunlip put a magnifying glass in his eye, and examined a stone carefully before he answered.

“I call this one an emerald. What do you call it?”

“I call it the same,” said Dyke jovially. “And the others too. Emeralds, my dear Cunlip—and beauties, eh? The real article.”

“Do you want me to weigh ’em up and name a price?” asked Mr. Cunlip.

“No. That’ll come later. What I want now is just your opinion—expert advice. Suppose—I say suppose, later on, I began to dribble them across to you! How many could you do with like that?”

“Why, as many as you could send. May I ask where they come from?”

“No, you mustn’t ask that—not just at present. I know where I got them, and Pedro del Sarto knows—and we’re the only two men alive who do know. But we think there’s more there in the same place—and I’m soon going to have a look.”

Then Mr. Cunlip spoke rather disparagingly of the specimens before him; he had his doubts as to colour; they were not very big either; he said that to judge actual merits before cutting was almost impossible, even to the greatest expert in the trade—and he delicately implied that between that gifted person and himself there was little if any difference. But, urged to do so, he gave a rough estimate of the value of a particular stone, if after cutting it proved as good as it looked now.

“Splendid! As much as that? Then I may take it that emeralds are keeping up their price, and it isn’t likely to drop?”

“Their price can’t drop—so far as I can see.”

“They’re as fashionable as ever?”

“They’re just as fashionable as they were in the time of the Incas.”

“Ah. Glorious?” Dyke gave an exultant laugh. “The Incas! Rem acu tetigisti.”

“I beg your pardon—what’s that?”

“Nothing,” said Dyke gaily. “I liked your way of putting it. The Incas! They covered themselves with emeralds, didn’t they? Very apt—your historical allusion. Emmie, did you hear what Mr. Cunlip said?”

While he spoke he was packing up his specimens in their tissue paper. He put the envelope in his waistcoat pocket, and, with compliments to Mr. Cunlip, he hurried away.

“Let’s walk, Emmie. No more cabs. Besides, all this has excited me. The days of the Incas! Ha, ha.”

And as they walked on, through Holborn and New Oxford Street, he told her the story of how he had found those emeralds quite by chance, high up in the mountains. As he sat resting in the fierce sunshine, he had seen one of them on the edge of a small basin of sand among black rocks, and had scratched for the others with his hands. He described the place—oh, yes, he could find his way back all right; he had mapped it very carefully, and given the corrected map to his partner, Pedro del Sarto. But he himself needed no maps; he could take you there blindfolded—a valley narrowing to and shut in by a perpendicular cliff a thousand feet high, down the face of which the melted snow had made deep channels—a valley where no white man had ever stood, where perhaps no man of any colour had even been since the Spanish Conquest four hundred years ago, till he, Dyke, came to tear the secret out of its lonely heart and profit by the discovery.

As she listened, she fancied that she could see it all in imagination. People on the crowded pavements jostled them, they passed close to the noses of van horses in crossing the Tottenham Court Road, and they noticed nothing of these surrounding sights, sounds, or pressures. They were both of them thousands of miles away.

The time of the Incas! Yes, he honestly believed that he had stumbled upon the trace of workings of emerald mines that were in use before the advent of the Spaniard. He might prove wrong, of course. He had been in a hurry, with no time for close investigations. Perhaps what he fancied had been wrought by human beings labouring was really made by nature using such of her tools as lay handy—storm, frost, sunshine, and the upheaving forces that had built the whole mountain backbone of the continent. In any case, the real point was—How many emeralds had man or nature left there?

At any rate, Dyke would go now and see for himself. It would be a lark. Let us leave it at that.

“Not a word to anybody, Emmie. You and I and old Pedro. No one else—till the day when I give my queen a tiara of green stones all as big as filberts, with a few Brazilian diamonds to flash among the greenness. Then when you go to the Opera—on one of the grand nights—you lovely Emmie, like a high priestess of the sun—then—But I say, let’s have tea. That is, if you don’t mind paying for it”; and, laughing, he grasped her elbow and led her into a crowded tea-shop.

They sat there, on a seat against the wall, at the end of a table that was occupied by other people; and Dyke while waiting for their tea and while eating two crumbly currant scones, continued to talk to her, but in a voice so low that no one else could hear. His eyes flashed sometimes, he raised his head and shook his hair; he was talking enthusiastically, with a freedom that he could only use to her, and in the midst of it quite automatically he pushed his cup across the marble table for more tea and picked up and began to eat another cake.

“You don’t know me yet. Above all, you don’t understand the impetus—the added drive—that your love has given to me. Listen. I can’t say it too often. You have lifted me up—you have placed me on high—you have saved me. For your sake—oh, how I worship you when you say those words—for your sake, Emmie, I must and I shall keep on the summits of endeavour—and never yield to the powers of darkness or the cowardice of shameful compromises. I’m all out now—to the last ounce—for my good angel’s sake. Yes, two lumps, please. These buns are stale.”

He went on, in his vibrating heart-stirring whisper, to speak of the South Pole. She had divined—as it seemed, long ago—that this was his ultimate goal, the glorious hope of his life’s work. Dyke meant, had always meant, to capture the South Pole, and all other tasks were but a filling or wasting of time. He had marked it down as his own. He spoke of it as if it had been some dangerous yet timid animal of the chase, round which he had made narrowing circles till it crouched fascinated, unable any more to flee from its pursuer; it knew that it could not escape and that when Dyke ceased to circle and dashed in, it must fall into his hands.

“Remember, Emmie, I’m not all talk; I’m do as well. Yes, Dyke will do things”; and his blue eyes flashed at her, and the colour came to those high cheek-bones as if the tea was beginning not only to cheer but to intoxicate. “If they won’t support me—if they won’t fit me out in the style I ask for—if they won’t give me the ship I want—Then in a sieve I’ll thither sail, and like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do. No, you don’t know me yet, Emmie. You don’t know me yet.”

But already how well she knew him! Better perhaps than he knew himself. She knew that behind all the courage which for so long had made him hold his life at a pin’s fee; behind the insatiable curiosity, the love of adventure, the fiery challenge to the universe that form the very substance of a true explorer’s mental constitution;—behind all that there was the unslumbering desire for personal fame. If only by his little individual trick of speaking of himself in the third person—“That’s not good enough for Dyke”; “Anthony Dyke has other plans”; and so on—she would have known so much as this. Habitually, during all those enforced silences that had made up his active career, he had listened to the imagined voices of the world thinking about him; and now he could not think of himself in relation to fame without, as it were, standing for a moment outside himself. Dyke wanted the South Pole; but Dyke wanted the undying fame of getting it. Why not? The labourer is worthy of his hire. She felt that she need not class his ambition—the last infirmity of noble minds—as even one slight defect of his innumerable glorious qualities.

Nevertheless, she thought sagely that it was the thing she must always reckon with—the factor never to be omitted from her calculations when making plans for his assistance, moral or immoral.

She knew him—he need not fear her lack of knowledge. She knew that he was noble to the core; simple only as everything fine and great will always be; at his own trade as resourceful as Pizarro, in all other things as grand a gentleman as Cortes; gentle with women, splendid with men—familiar, as people who live their whole lives in Kensington cannot be, calling sea-captains old boy, slapping underlings on the back, and yet being a leader and a chieftain all the while. Yes—even when exploding under a misapprehension with cab-drivers.

Before paying the bill for tea, she picked up the bunch of roses that he had bought from the beggar. She attached exactly the same value to it as if it had been that tiara of emeralds. It had been given to her by him. And with deep penetrating joy she remembered how he had called her his queen, wishing for an instant perhaps that she was really and truly some splendid historical queen or empress. But, no, even then she would have been just as unworthy of such a lover.