Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/270

 might well be that he loathed her; yet in that night they were near. And her soul rose up and seemed to swim from great depths towards him; a drowned, dead soul, resuscitated by his gaze. It clung to him. He seemed to feel it fasten itself upon him and hide in him; like a bat; a bat creeping into its refuge and huddling there. Or was it not, rather, like a silver star rising up from the depths towards the companion star of his soul, bent to look down into the darkness? Bat, or star? Which?

'I wish I understood you,' he said, half hypnotized by her gaze and by the tension of his thought.

'You do,' said Madame de Lamouderie.

'No.' He shook his head. 'No; I don't. Because you don't understand yourself.'

'Which of us does?'

'Some of us have things out with ourselves. Some of us never do. I don't feel that you do. I feel, now'—he was thinking, thinking, his eyes on hers—'that you are having them out for me; not for yourself.'

'That is because I love you,' said Madame de Lamouderie.

'Yes. I know,' Graham replied. 'But that isn't enough. You must find more substance than that.'

Something dropped away from her gaze then; as if the resuscitated soul drowsed back again, sank down, reëntered its oblivion. Perhaps the words she had uttered, and that he had so quietly accepted, woke her too fully to the temporal order of existence. He watched the star sink, sink, out of sight while, almost