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THE BOND
289

"I only hope they'll leave me there in peace. It's world enough for me."

"But you do come.out of it occasionally."

"Mainly because of the climate. In winter it's delightful. Then there are people one likes to look up now and then."

Teresa wondered if Crayven's wife was included in this category. He never spoke of her.

"It's a curious life," she said, absently. "But it seems to suit you, somehow. I knew when I first saw you that you had had some unusual experience."

He looked up at her steadily. They had walked far up into the pine forest, and were sitting on the bank of a stream, Teresa on a flat rock, Crayven a little way below. Teresa met his look, with a feeling of strangeness in its meditative intensity. It was familiar to her now, but there was something in it she did not understand. She had seen it first the day they had met in the Louvre, and then, too, had first noticed in his manner toward her the peculiar interest, the touch of emotion which had nothing of gallantry about it, that now she had come to accept as a fact, as yet unexplained. Their relation had leaped the stage of acquaintanceship, and oddly taken on the character of intimacy, but without confidences on either side. Crayven had told her nothing of his life, beyond the active phase of his work, and she had had no impulse to tell