twitching again. He looked
terribly excited. Henley listened in silence. He had lost all wish to
interrupt.

"He goes down into the room below where the woman is, with her dark
hair, and her dead-white face, and her extraordinary eyes--large,
luminous, sometimes dull and without expression, sometimes dilated, and
with an unnatural life staring out of them. She is on the sofa near the
fire. He sits down beside her. His head falls into his hands, and at
first he is silent. He is thinking how he will tell her. She puts her
soft, dry hand on his, and she says: 'I am very tired to-night. Do not
begin your evening sermon. Let me have it to-morrow. How you must love
me to be so persistent! and how you must love me to be so stupid as to
think that your power of will can break the power of such a habit as
mine!'

"Then he draws his hand away from hers, and he lifts his head from his
hands, and he tells her the truth. She leans back against a cushion
staring at him in silence, devouring him with her eyes, which have
become very bright and eager and searching. Presently he stops.

"'Go on,' she says, 'go on. Tell me more. Tell me all you feel. Tell
me how the habit stole upon you, and came to you again and again, and
stayed with you. Tell me how you first liked it, and then loved it, and
how it was something to you, and then much, and then everything. Go on!
go on!'

"And he catches her excitement. He conceals nothing from her. All the
hideous, terrible, mental processes he has been through, he details
to her, at first almost gloating over his own degradation. He even
exaggerates, as a man exaggerates in telling a story to an eager
auditor. He is carried away by her strange fury of listening. He lays
bare his soul; he exposes its wounds; he sears them with red-hot irons
for her to see. And then at last all is told. He can think of no more
details. He has even embellished the abominable truth. So he is silent,
and he looks at her."

"And what does she do?" asked Henley, with a catch in his voice as he
spoke. Undoubtedly in relating a fictitious narrative Andrew had a quite
abnormal power of making it appear true and real.

"She looks at him, and then she bursts out laughing. Her eyes shine with
triumph. She is glad; she is joyous with the joy of a lost soul when it
sees that other souls are irrevocably lost too; she laughs, and she says
nothing."

"And the man?"

Andrew's eyes suddenly dilated. He leaned forward and laid