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 “Not again?” she said with foreboding.

“I’m afraid so,” the other answered unhappily.

Mr. Talliaferro hearkened also. “Perhaps I’d better ” Mrs. Maurier fixed him with her eye, and Mrs. Wiseman said:

“Poor fellows. They have had to stand a great deal in the last few days.”

“Boys will be boys,” Mr. Talliaferro added with docile regret, listening with yearning to that vaguely convivial sound. Mrs. Maurier listened to it, coldly detached and speculative. She said:

“But we are moving again, anyway.”

The sun was setting across the scudding water: the water was shot goldenly with it, as was the gleaming mahogany-and-brass elegance of the yacht, and the silver wings in his heart were touched with pink and gold while he stood and looked downward upon the coarse crown of her head and at her body’s grave and sexless replica of his own attitude against the rail—an unconscious aping both comical and heart-shaking.

“Do you know,” he asked, “what Cyrano said once?” ''Once there was a king who possessed all things. All things were his: power, and glory, and wealth, and splendor and ease. And so he sat at dusk in his marble court filled with the sound of water and of birds and surrounded by the fixed gesturing of palms, looking out across the hushed fading domes of his city and beyond, to the dreaming lilac barriers of his world.''

“No: what?” she asked. But he only looked down upon her with his cavernous uncomfortable eyes. “What did he say?” she repeated. And then: “Was he in love with her?”

“I think so Yes, he was in love with her. She couldn’t leave him, either. Couldn’t go away from him at all.”