The Last Ditch

. No discrepancy stopped the tumultuous striding of his thoughts after her flying image and the multitude of her sentences. She had amplified her story. Her

ow the years go. I am older than you, Sir Romney. These are years on the vine now. I am nearing thirty. I am afraid of this waiting. It sometimes makes me feel sour to wait. I don't want to be sour when he comes. I want one more child-one child from him. I learned something of what it means-oh, just the beginning of that mighty mystery. I would kill him-if he did not prove

in in his berth, sentence by sente

s romance is greater to

and upon his knee: "Sometimes I feel as if I were

perb woman burning with a dream. Romney felt that there was stuff in her to endure fire that would wither most women. She had the physique for great emotions. He quite believed that she was c

of the male," she had said. "Look at the fate of t

an companion. Then there were other moments of personal relation-as if she felt from the first the power she possessed for him; that she was interested in making it greater; that she loved the use of her power in his arousing; even that he might be or become something of this solar being she dreamed of.... A

in the bamboo clumps with the most famous tea of the Empire. Two white butterflies were wh

e common kid-day butterflies. I don't k

bedroom window where I slept as a child. The silk was gray brown, a filmy weave like a dress my mother wore as I first remember. I loved her terribly in that dress-ah, the moths, I was telling you. I broke the branch and took the cocoon to the room. Then there was a night in the following June when I happened to be ho

le room. That house was full of ghosts to me, and there seemed no love in the world-only loneliness

ure of the birth of a winged thing there in the shadows. The moth itself was on the screen-a gleaming gray creation, with a light of its own about it-the light of the fairy world which I remembered from a child. The wings were whirring silently-the sti

o hear. They were there together-a mystic pair of wonderful gray mates-one on the outside of the screen, one in the room. I

s her

et he was glad, for this had never happened before. It did not occur to him that this mysterious establishment of their relation was fatal to the real romance. Each minute forged him anew. She was great and glowing. He did not know t

the very points that he excelled, she chose to master him. It was as if he had been provinced in Asia and she had come from all the earth. His thought of her to-day was n

omney chose to use for a time, but there came a moment of late afternoon when a matter of service required explicit information, and Romney administ

suddenly. "You must have come to Ch

efore that. My ways have not been interesting. Since you cam

hank you. Sometimes, Sir Romn

e long, though I have worked with them and for them. Always the different, the more hidden things called me. Until yesterda

he earth was risen in beauty-birds singing as they only sing in the sun-mists that follow a night of rain. It was a seething of bird-song, of colour and fragrance-just a year after the tiger. As I listened, the fury of longing that I live with came upon me in high tide-and then in the midst of it, I heard

ing. So much of me was a

re. Longstruth's is worth coming up the river for. China is sweeter here and undefiled. I would be hideously lonely w

t I have is drab and young. I would have mad

t you. You do not diminish. Oh,

nd obey,"