Through it she heard his voice faintly; her own seemed unreal when she answered.

He said:  “Speaking of love; there is only one thing possible for me, Shiela—­to go on loving you.  I can’t kill hope, though there seems to be none.  But there’s no use in saying so to myself for it is one of those things no man believes.  He may grow tired of hoping, and, saying there is none, live on.  But neither he nor Fate can destroy hope any more than he can annihilate his soul.  He may change in his heart.  That he cannot control.  When love goes no man can stay its going.”

“Do you think yours will go?”

“No.  That is a lover’s answer.”

“What is a sane man’s answer?”

“Ask some sane man, Shiela.”

“I would rather believe you.”

“Does it make you happy?”

“Yes.”

“You wish me to love you?”

“Yes.”

“You would love me—­a little—­if you could?”

She closed her eyes.

“Would you?” he asked again.

“Yes.”

“But you cannot.”

She said, dreamily:  “I don’t know.  That is a dreadful answer to make.  But I don’t know what is in me.  I don’t know what I am capable of doing.  I wish I knew; I wish I could tell you.”

“Do you know what I think, Shiela?”

“What?”

“It’s curious—­but since I have known you—­and about your birth—­the idea took shape and persisted—­that—­that—­”

“What?” she asked.

“That, partly perhaps because of your physical beauty, and because of your mind and its intelligence and generosity, you embodied something of that type which this nation is developing.”

“That is curious,” she said softly.

“Yes; but you give me that impression, as though in you were the lovely justification of these generations of welding together alien and native to make a national type, spiritual, intelligent, wholesome, beautiful....  And I’ve fallen into the habit of thinking of you in that way—­as thoroughly human, thoroughly feminine, heir to the best that is human, and to its temptations too; yet, somehow, instinctively finding the right way in life, the true way through doubt and stress....  Like the Land itself—­with perhaps the blood of many nations in your veins....  I don’t know exactly what I’m trying to say—­”

“I know.”

“Yes,” he whispered, “you do know that all I have said is only a longer way of saying that I love you.”

“Through stress and doubt,” she murmured, “you think I will find the way?—­with perhaps the blood of many nations in my veins, with all their transmitted emotions, desires, passions for my inheritance?...  It is my only heritage.  They did not even leave me a name; only a capacity for every human error, with no knowledge of what particular inherited failing I am to contend with when temptation comes.  Do you wonder I am sometimes lonely and afraid?”