"Your work is a curse to you if it makes you do these things."
"It is all I have," was her strange answer.
He turned in his chair and looked at her. In her face was none of the bitter humiliation of the woman whose weaknesses are suddenly exposed and condemned. She was smiling a little, a smile with a twist to it, like the smile of a child who is determined not to weep. And her smoke-coloured eyes, bright and sad with tears, and exile, and lost joys, and all the sorrow of the Irishry, were the eyes of the woman who had been given him in a dream. While he looked at her she closed them and sat very still. At last he knew that there was no question of fleeing from Fate. He leaned forward and laid his lips on her sad smiling mouth, and found there the answer to many a question.
Yet when he spoke it was to ask another.
"Now will you leave writing?"
"Yes, Garrett," she said simply. "I will leave everything for you; I think it was written so in the beginning of things."
CHAPTER III
FATE'S WINDING PATHS
"Does the road wind uphill all the way?
Yes, to the weary end."
With Westenra's kiss still warm on her lips Valentine Valdana knelt in her cabin, elbows plunged in the low plush-covered lounge, eyes closed, lips slightly parted, her upturned face resting in the palms of her hands as still and rapt as the face of a visionnaire, and indeed it was in visionary scenes that her mind wandered: scenes of the past peopled with the absent and the dead. Sometimes her lips moved and she spoke a name--her mother's, her father's, a child's, an old woman's, that of a man who lay by her mother's side in the Durban cemetery--one whom the world had known as a brilliant but drunken journalist, but whom she remembered only as a great heart and loved friend. For she had a great capacity for loving, this woman; she did not know how to merely like people; when she cared at all she loved and gave her best. She loved all the people with whom she was dreaming now, and she loved them still with a love that reached over seas and past the grave; in her radiant new-found happiness her thoughts flew to them wishing that they too might be glad with her.