have." A bitter laugh accompanied the admission. Quite suddenly she threw her arms wide in a dramatic gesture. "Look at me," she cried. "You see a Pole, but before all things you see a woman. Give riot to your heart, and leave your head for other things. Then you will understand my motives. I have lived through centuries of horror during that terrible war. A horror that even you, who know the horrors committed, will never be able to understand. The innocent women and children in Belgium and France, and my own country, on your own shores, on the high seas. O God," she buried her face in her hands. Then, in a moment, she looked up. "Think—think, if at some future time the Teuton demons overrun this beautiful land I love. The past, those horrors of which I have spoken are nothing to that which will be committed here in England. Now do you understand? Now—will you let me show you what—I can show you?"
"I think I understand—now."
"And you will grant my request?" The urgency was intense. But in a moment the woman went on in a changed tone. A soft smile accompanied her next words. "But no. Don't answer now. It would not be fair to yourself. It would not be fair to your country. It would even deny all that I believe of you. Keep your answer. You will give it to me—later. I will not let you forget. Now I must go."
She rose to her feet, and Ruxton watched her with stirring feelings as she occupied herself with that truly feminine process of smoothing out the creases of the costume which had suffered by contact with the heather.
At last she held out her white-gloved hand, and Ruxton sprang to his feet. He realized that she was about to vanish out of his life as swiftly and mysteriously as she had entered it.
"You are going?" he said quickly.
"Yes. But you will be reminded."
The man held the gloved hand a shade longer than was necessary.
"But on these cliffs? Alone?" Somehow her going had become impossible to him.
But the woman laughed easily.
"It will be only a few moments on these cliffs. It is nothing. Remember I have been wandering about for three hours—alone."
"But—Good-bye!"
The man made his farewell regretfully. He had been about to ask her how, with ten miles to Dorby, and a considerable distance to other villages, she would only be on the cliffs a few moments. But he felt that her coming and her going were her secret, and he had no right to pry into it—yet.
"Good-bye."
The woman turned away, but was promptly arrested by a swift question.
"May I not know your name?"
The stranger faced him once more, and her smile lit up her radiant features till Ruxton felt that never in his life had he seen anything to equal her beauty.
"My name? Yes—why not? It is Vladimir. Vita Vladimir."
Then, in a moment, the man stood gazing after her, as the brilliant moonlight outlined the perfect symmetry of her receding figure.
CHAPTER III
THE MYSTERY
Ruxton Farlow's return home was even more preoccupied than had been his going. An entirely new sensation was stirring within him. Before, his thoughts had been flowing along the troubled channel of affairs, all of which bore solely upon the purpose of his life. Now their flow had been further confused by the addition of an emotion, which, under ordinary circumstances, might well have leavened the most gloomy forebodings. Instead, however, it was rather like an artist engaged on painting a picture of tragic significance who suddenly discovers that another hand has added some detail, which, while it is still a part of the subject portrayed, yet renders the whole a masterpiece of incongruity.
The coming of a woman into the affairs of his life seemed to him as incongruous as it was pleasant, and, in the circumstances, justified. It was an element all unconsidered before. His association with women until now had been the simple parrying of the feminine shafts levelled at him in the process of ordinary social intercourse in the position he occupied in life. He was by no means a man who took no delight in women's society. On the contrary. But his purpose in life had always been too big as yet to permit his dwelling upon those pleasures which no real manhood can ever ignore.
Women were to him part of the most exalted side of a man's life. His ideals in that direction were as wholly unworldly as his ideals were practical in every other direction. From his earliest youth, due to the death of his mother at his birth, he had never experienced a woman's influence upon his life, and thus he had been left to the riot of imagination, which, in very truth, had been his safeguarding against the operation of the matrimonial market of social London in the midst of which he had found himself plunged.
Now, under conditions wholly robbed of every convention, he had suddenly been confronted by a wonderful creature, who, to his vivid imagination, appealed as the most beautiful of all her beautiful sex. Furthermore the contact had been brought about through those very ideals and purposes to which he had devoted his life. And, moreover, the wonder of it all was that his purpose was apparently her purpose, and she had sought him because this was so. Herein lay the extraordinary incongruity of a sex attraction brought about by the threatened tragedy overshadowing them all.
Vita Vladimir!
It was a name such as he might have discovered anywhere amongst the foreign colony in Soho. His attraction towards the woman afforded no glamor to the name. None at all. He told himself frankly it did not fit her. Furthermore it left him unconvinced that it truly belonged to her. Yet she said she was a Pole. And somewhere in the back cells of memory there was a sort of hazy recollection that "Vladimir" had some connection with Polish history.
However, the question of her name left him cold. Only the vivid picture of her personality remained in his mind. Her charm, her ardor, her beauty, and that extraordinary suggestion of mystery, conveyed in her costume, and the evasion of the details of her coming and going—these things had caught the imagination and the youth in him, and acted upon them like champagne.
He strove to thrust aside these things and consider her only through the purpose on which she had sought him out. She knew, and had seen, the realities of the threat which he believed to be hanging over his country. She could, and would, show him these things.
Suddenly on the impulse of a reasonable incredulity he asked himself if he were dreaming. The whole thing must be a mere phantasm, the outcome of all the troubled thought which had occupied him for so long. But she had told him he would hear from her again, and then that tiny white-gloved hand. He felt its clasp now, as it had lain in his strong palm. No, it was no dream. She was real—and she was very, very beautiful.
By the time he reached the great colonnade which formed the entrance porch of his home the woman's personality had dominated all his endeavor to regard the incident from any other point of view. The woman had absorbed all that was in him, and a curious, deep, thrilling sensation of delight at the encounter had completely thrust into the background the purpose which had brought it about. All that which we in our consideration of the affairs of life are apt to despise, and even leave out of our reckoning altogether, had asserted itself. It was the sex instinct, which no power of human mentality can resist.
Ruxton
