"Have you, Nona?"
She answered, "Do you think that's what life is, Marko?"
"It's not unlike," he said. And he added, "Except about some one coming along with a stick and drawing a bit into safety. I'm not so sure about that. Perhaps that's what we're all looking for—"
He suddenly realised that he was back precisely at the thoughts his mind had taken up on the morning he had met her. But with a degree more of illumination. Two feelings came into his mind, the second hard upon the other and overriding it, as a fierce horseman might catch and override one pursued. He said, "It's rather jolly to have some one that can see ideas like that." And then the overriding, and he said with astonishing roughness, "But you—you aren't flotsam! How can you be flotsam—the life you've—taken?"
And, lo, if he had struck her, and she been bound, defenceless, and with her eyes entreating not to be struck again, she could not deeper have entreated him than in the glance she fleeted from her eyes, the quiver of her lids that first released, then veiled it.
It stopped his words. It caught his throat.
IV
He got up quickly. "I say, Nona, never mind about thinking. I'll tell you what's been doing. Rotten. Happened just after I met you the other day."
"The dust on these roads!" she said. She touched her eyes with her handkerchief. "What, Marko?"
"Well, old Fortune promised to take me into partnership about an age ago."