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 waited the life for which she had fought and risked so much.

"It will never seem home to me again," she answered.

"But it was your home once!"

"Yes, I used to think it was almost beautiful. The movement and colour and mystery of it! The fiestas, and the music, the glitter and pomp of its little court life that so satisfied my foolish vanity, the riding and the freedom, the passion and warmth of everything! You may not believe me, or understand me when I say it, but I can remember when it used to make me almost drunk, especially at night!"

He felt vaguely envious of those earlier and happier days ; he felt that he had been cheated out of something. But her eyes, through all their mournfulness, glowed like a tropical sea touched with moonlight, as she smiled up at him; and he forgot the feeling.

"It was beautiful to me—then," she confessed. "But the beauty was there, I think, because I put it there."

To the eyes of the tired and anxious man at her side it seemed anything but beautiful. It seemed a land of unbroken silence, of sullen mystery, of primordial shadow and gloom, from the white lip of the beach that sucked so feverishly at the pale copper-green of the sea-water