"Is this what you don't understand, Virginia?"
"Yes; that—and your moderation."
His smile changed, but it was still a smile.
"Nor I," he said. "Like our friend, Warren Hastings, I am astonished. But there our resemblance ends."
The eagle on the wet sands ruffled, shook his silvery hackles, and looked around at them. Then, head low and thrust forward, he hulked slowly toward the remains of the dead fish from which but now he had retired in the disgust of satiation.
Meanwhile Malcourt and Miss Suydam were walking cautiously forward again, selecting every footstep as though treading on the crumbling edges of an abyss.
"It's rather stupid that I never suspected it," she said, musing aloud.
"Suspected what?"
"The existence of this other woman called Virginia Suydam. And I might have been mercifully ignorant of her until I died, if you had not looked at me and seen us both at once."
"We all are that way."