"'But what?' I asked.
"'She will marry again,' Miss Kinaitsky remarked in a low tone. 'I am positive. I do not see how we can blame her. She submitted to the arrangement. But she did not love him. We feel it, because he spoke of her in such terms ... it was almost adoration. There was never any other woman for him....'
"A silence fell between us because, as you can easily imagine, I had nothing to offer commensurate with the extraordinary exaltation of her mood. It was plain enough that to a woman like her love could not possibly be what I had conceived it. To her it was a divine flame through which she would discern the transfigured features of her beloved. To her it was a supreme sacrament administered in a sacred chamber whence had been shut out all the evil which impregnates the heart of man. And I sat there wondering. When I left that sumptuous and smoothly running mansion and walked out across the Heath in the dusk toward the Spaniards Inn, I was still wondering whether each of us could be right. And I wonder still. For if it were true that love were what she and her kind imagine it to be, then I had never seen it. To me it had been nothing so transcendentally easy as that. To me it had been an obscure commotion, an enigmatic storm on which the human soul, with its drogue of inherited sorrows, was flung on its beam ends, stove in and dismasted, while beyond, far off, there shone a faint light, the flash of a derisive smile, flashing and then suddenly going out. And even now, in the mists of the accumulating years, I wonder still."
For the last time Mr. Spenlove paused, and stepping out to the rail, he stood there, with his back to the men who had listened to his story, silhouetted against the first pale flush of the dawn, looking away to the horizon where could be seen a tiny light, shrouded to point straight toward them, flashing once, twice, with mysterious caution, and then going out.