, or thought I saw, that you loved me,
I was God. I said on reading your sweet letter, 'My life shall not
pass without kissing at least once the lips of my chimera.'"

Words and images rose in his mind without sensation or effort, and
experiencing the giddiness and exultation of the orator, he strove to
win her with eloquence. And all his magnetism was in his hands and
eyes--deep blue eyes full of fire and light were fixed upon
her--hands, soft yet powerful hands held hers, sometimes were
clenched on hers, and a voice which seemed his soul rose and fell,
striving to sting her with passionate sound; but she remained
absorbed in, and could not be drawn out of, angry thought.

"Now you are with me," he said, "nearly mine; here I see you like a
picture that is mine. Around us is mighty London. I saved you from
God, am I to lose you to Man? This was the prospect that faced me,
that faces me, that drove me mad. All I did was to attempt to make
you mine. I hold you by so little--I could not bear the thought that
you might pass from me. A ship sails away, growing indistinct, and
then disappears in the shadows; in London a cab rattles, appears and
disappears behind other cabs, turns a corner, and is lost for ever. I
failed, but had I succeeded you would have come back to me; I failed,
is not that punishment enough? You will go from me; I shall not get
you--that is sorrow enough for me; do not refuse me forgiveness. Ah!
if you knew what it is to have sought love passionately, the high
hopes entertained, and then the depth of every deception, and now
the supreme grief of finding love and losing. Seeing love leave me
without leaving one flying feather for token, I strove to pluck
one--that is my crime. Go, since you must go, but do not go
unforgiving, lest perhaps you might regret."

Lily did not cry. Her indignation was vented in broken phrases, the
meaning of which she did not seem to realize, and so jarred and
shaken were her nerves that without being aware of it her talk
branched into observations on her mother, her home life, the convent,
and the disappointments of childhood. So incoherently did she speak
that for a moment Mike feared her brain was affected, and his efforts
to lead her to speak of the present were fruitless. But suddenly,
waxing calm, her inner nature shining through the eyes like light
through porcelain, she said--

"I was wrong to come here, but I imagined men different. We know so
little of the world i