He turned sharply—­calling into the shop behind him, and a boy came running, his eyes flashing a quick laugh, his teeth glinting.

“I go,” said the man, with quick gesture—­“You keep shop—­I go.”  He had taken off his white apron and seized a hat.  He touched the woman on the shoulder.  “Come,” he said.

She looked at him with dazed glance and put her hand to her head.  “I cannot think,” she said slowly.

He nodded with steady glance.  “When we go, you tell—­we find her,” he said.

She started then and looked at him—­and the clear colour came to her face.  “You know—­where—­she is!”

But he shook his head.  “We find her,” he repeated.  “You tell.”

And as they threaded the streets—­into drays and past clanging cars and through the tangle of wheels and horses and noise—­and she told him the story, shouting it above the rumble and hurry of the streets, into the dark ear that bent beside her.

The look in Achilles’s face deepened, but its steady quiet did not change.  “We find her,” he repeated each time, and Miss Stone’s heart caught the rhythm of it, under the hateful noise.  “We find her.”

Then the great house on the lake faced them.

She looked at him a minute in doubt.  Her face broke—­“She may have come—­home?” she said.

“I go with you,” said Achilles.

There was no sign of life, but the door swung open before them and they went into the great hall—­up the long stairway that echoed only vacant softness, and into the library with its ranging rows of perfect books.  She motioned him before her. “I must tell them,” she said.  She passed through the draperies of another door and the silence of the great house settled itself about the man and waited with him.

XI

TWO MEN FACE EACH OTHER

He looked about the room with quiet face.  It was the room he had been in before—­the day he spoke to the Halcyon Club—­the ladies had costly gowns and strange hats, who had listened so politely while he told them of Athens and his beloved land.  The room had been lighted then, with coloured lamps and globes—­a kind of rosy radiance.  Now the daylight came in through the high windows and filtered down upon him over brown books and soft, leather-covered walls.  There was no sound in the big room.  It seemed shut off from the world and Achilles sat very quiet, his dark face a little bent, his gaze fixed on the rug at his feet.  He was thinking of the child—­and of her face when she had lifted it to him out of the crowded street, that first day, and smiled at him... and of their long talks since.  It was the Child who understood.  The strange ladies had smiled at him and talked to him and drank their tea and talked again... he could hear the soft, keen humming of their voices and the flitter of garments all about him as they moved.  But the child had sat very still—­only her