“And on the ground of temporary insanity you would repudiate the bargain?”

Unorna shrugged her shoulders impatiently and did not answer.  Keyork relinquished the fencing.

“It is of no importance,” he said, changing his tone.  “Your dream—­or whatever it was—­seems to have been the second of your two experiences.  You said there were two, did you not?  What was the first?”

Unorna sat silent for some minutes, as though collecting her thoughts.  Keyork, who never could have enough light, busied himself with another lamp.  The room was now brighter than it generally was in the daytime.

Unorna watched him.  She did not want to make confidences to him, and yet she felt irresistibly impelled to do so.  He was a strange compound of wisdom and levity, in her opinion, and his light-hearted moods were those which she most resented.  She was never sure whether he was in reality tactless, or frankly brutal.  She inclined to the latter view of his character, because he always showed such masterly skill in excusing himself when he had gone too far.  Neither his wisdom nor his love of jesting explained to her the powerful attraction he exercised over her whole nature, and of which she was, in a manner, ashamed.  She could quarrel with him as often as they met, and yet she could not help being always glad to meet him again.  She could not admit that she liked him because she dominated him; on the contrary, he was the only person she had ever met over whom she had no influence whatever, who did as he pleased without consulting her, and who laughed at her mysterious power so far as he himself was concerned.  Nor was her liking founded upon any consciousness of obligation.  If he had helped her to the best of his ability in the great experiment, it was also clear enough that he had the strongest personal interest in doing so.  He loved life with a mad passion for its own sake, and the only object of his study was to find a means of living longer than other men.  All the aims and desires and complex reasonings of his being tended to this simple expression—­the wish to live.  To what idolatrous self-worship Keyork Arabian might be capable of descending, if he ever succeeded in eliminating death from the equation of his immediate future, it was impossible to say.  The wisdom of ages bids us beware of the man of one idea.  He is to be feared for his ruthlessness, for his concentration, for the singular strength he has acquired in the centralization of his intellectual power, and because he has welded, as it were, the rough metal of many passions and of many talents into a single deadly weapon which he wields for a single purpose.  Herein lay, perhaps, the secret of Unorna’s undefined fear of Keyork and of her still less definable liking for him.

She leaned one elbow on the table and shaded her eyes from the brilliant light.

“I do not know why I should tell you,” she said at last.  “You will only laugh at me, and then I shall be angry, and we shall quarrel as usual.”