"I love Vere," she said. "She is very close to me. She knows it. She
does not doubt me or my love."

"But," he quietly persisted, "you still allow your mind to rove
ungoverned among those dangerous ways of the past?"

"Emile," she said, still speaking with vehemence, "it may be very easy
to a strong man like you to direct his thoughts, to keep them out of
one path and guide them along another. It may be--I don't know whether
it is; but I don't pretend to such strength. I don't believe it is
ever given to women. Perhaps even strength has its sex--I sometimes
think so. I have my strength, believe me. But don't require of me the
peculiar strength that is male."

"The truth is that you love living in the past as the Bedouin loves
living in the desert."

"It was my oasis," she answered, simply.

"And all these years--they have made no difference?"

"Did you think they would? Did you think they had?"

"I hoped so. I thought--I had begun to think that you lived again in
Vere."

"Emile, you can always stand the truth, can't you? Don't say you
can't. That would hurt me horribly. Perhaps you do not know how
sometimes I mentally lean on you. And I like to feel that if you knew