“But,” she said, smiling up at him, “I have nothing to tell you. There is nothing more. It ends here. Forgive me. It is my plot and it wouldn't work out your way. There are too many conflicting lines of wisdom in your way. My life lately has been what you would call, perhaps, a study in realism, and you want me to be, perhaps, a symbolic romance. I am sure you would express it very cleverly. But I think one lives by taking resolutions rather than by spinning coins, which promise either a throned woman, or a wreath and the denomination of a money value. One turns up so much that is none of these things. Men don't treat women that way. I married to be rich, and was very wretched, and perhaps your fame, when it comes, will be as sad to you. Perhaps the trouble lies in what you called 'the third disposal.' But I did not like being a study in realism. I should not mind being something symbolic, if I might prove my gratitude”—she took her hand from his arm, put one foot on the step and laughed, a pleasant little ripple of sound—“by becoming literary material.” The door shut to, and the carriage moved away into the storm with a muffled roll of wheels.
Noel stared after it blankly, and then looked around him. It was half a block now to Mrs. Tibbett. He walked on mechanically, and mounted the steps by habit. The outer door was not locked. A touch of compunction had visited Mrs. Tibbett.
He crept into his bed, and lay noting the growing warmth and sense of sleep, and wondering whether that arched doorway was the third of the three or the second. Strictly speaking he seemed to have gone in at the middle one and come out at the third, or was it not the first rather than the middle entrance that he had sheltered in? The three arched entrances capered and contorted before him in the dark, piled themselves into the portal of a Moorish palace, twisted themselves in a kind of mystical trinity and seal of Solomon, floated apart and became thin, filmy, crescent moons over a frozen sea. He sat up in bed and smote the coverlet.
“I don't know her name! She never told me!” He clutched his hair, and then released it cautiously. “It's Musidora! I forgot that sonnet!”
'Twas Musidora, whom the mystic nine
Gave to my soul to be forever mine,
And, as through shadows manifold of Dis,
Showed in her eyes, through dusky distances
And clouds, the moving lights about their shrine;
Now ever on my soul her touch shall be