t I could feel the beating of her heart.

"I don't want to love any one else," I whispered desperately. "I want
you. I want you to love me. I want you to let me take you."

I thought when I had said this and pressed my lips to the back of her
hand and looked up at her again that her face was illuminated with
wonder, joy, and supreme gladness, and that her eyes were filled with
light reflected from some bright revelation. What, then, was my
astonishment to observe that, as I looked, the color seemed to fade from
her skin, her parted lips slowly compressed themselves, her eyelids fell
like those of one who suffered pain or shuts out some repulsive sight!
It may have been my imagination; but I was sure I felt her hand turn
cold in mine and draw away as if to escape a menace. Her body stiffened
as if preparing for effort or defense and she arose from her seat and
stood before me.

So little did I understand the significance of her actions that I
neither moved nor spoke.

She came toward me then and placed the tips of her fingers upon my
shoulder affectionately, I can say--as she might have touched her
father, and as if she meant to cause some unsaid thing to flow through
the contact into my body.

"Please do not get up," she said softly. "Do not follow me."

There was strength in that command.

She walked toward the long windows at the back of the room, the windows
which overlooked the garden, and pulling them open, stepped out onto the
balcony. The vine there being in bloom, her figure was framed with the
soft purple of the flowers, which, lit by the light from within and
pendant against the black background of night, might well have been
blossoms embroidered on Japanese black satin. With my head swimming, I
watched the movement of her bare shoulders, from which her modest scarf
had half fallen, until she turned to enter again.

"I shall not tell you that I am sorry that you have spoken as you have,"
she said, spacing her words so evenly that it gave the impression at
first that she was repeating memorized sentences. "But I am young and no
one else has ever done so. Perhaps I should have interrupted you and
told you that my duty is toward my father, and that I am not sure of
myself now, and that I am not ready to give myself to any other life. If
this is true, it can profit neither of us to talk of love."

"Neither of us!" Again it seemed to me that she had disclosed herself. I
stood before her and in a voice tha