"I heard him ask Mrs. Nordenheimer, his hostess, who she was, in his guttural voice, and Mrs. Nordenheimer came up to me and presented him and asked me to introduce him to my guest. So I did. The Nordenheimers are those very rich German Jews who bought Broomgrove Park some years ago. Every one receives them now."
"And how did Harietta welcome this partner?"
"She looked a little bored, but afterwards they danced several times together."
"Ah!"—and that was all Verisschenzko said, but his thoughts ran: "An infantry officer—not a large enough capture for Harietta to waste time on in a public place—when she is here to advance herself. She danced with him because she was obliged to. I must ascertain who this man is."
Amaryllis saw that he was preoccupied. They walked on now and round through the shrubbery on the left, and so at last to the house again. Amaryllis could not chance being late.
Verisschenzko recovered from his abstraction presently and talked of many things—of the friendship of the soul, and how it can only thrive after there has been in some life a physical passionate love and fusion of the bodies.
"I want to think that we have reached this stage, Lady mine. My mission on this plane now is so fierce a one, and the work which I must do is so absorbing, that I must renounce all but transient physical pleasures. But I must keep some radiant star as my lodestone for spiritual delights, and ever since we met and spoke at the Russian Embassy it seems as though step by step links of memory are awakening and comforting me with knowledge of satisfied desire in a former birth, so that now our souls can rise to rarer things. I can even see another in the earthly relation which once was mine, without jealousy. Child, do you feel this too?"
"I do not know quite what I feel," and Amaryllis looked down, "but I will try to show you that I am learning to master my emotions, by thinking only of sympathy between our spirits."
"It is well—"
Then they reached the house and entered the green drawing-room in the Queen Anne Square, by one of the wide open windows, and there Amaryllis held out her two slim hands to Verisschenzko.