"And who is the thief, and what is the thing?" she asked, with a bright smile.
"Ruffian Death," he answered, for a moment overwhelmed by some dark dread and chilling foreboding.
She grew paler in her black dress; the hand resting on the table seemed whiter than life.
"But, William, I am quite well; I never felt better in all my life; and I think, considering what has lately happened, that is very wonderful." She was anxious, and looked into his face with eyes of grave solicitude.
Still he was following up the chain of his thoughts, and for the moment, unaware, he uttered them:
"There is death in every day, danger in every hour; you must encounter the danger. The way in which you meet the danger decides your relations with death. Life is a series of compromises with death. I wish I were not going away."
"So do I, indeed, William," she said earnestly. "But you must not be uneasy on my part; I am quite well, and shall keep quite well while you are away. I should be most unhappy if I thought you went away uncomfortable on my account."
The tone of the girl's voice brought him back to a consciousness of the situation. His manner changed. He looked up at her and smiled.
"Unhappy about you, Maud! Not I. You must not think that. I was talking generalities; I was not alluding to your case. You see, when a man has been a long time in a foreign country, where the speech of the people in the streets is unknown to him, and where, among the few people who speak European languages, there are only a couple for whose society he cares, he falls into one bad habit certainly, that of looking at all things in the abstract; and into another bad habit probably, that of muttering aloud to himself. I am afraid I have been treating you to a small example of both vices." He smiled brightly, and held out his hand to her.
She took the small white hand off the ebony table and placed it in his. The brown fingers closed over the white ones, and looking down at the joined hands he said: