ne it. A
word would serve the purpose and make it all right again. Indeed, his
revulsion of feeling so altered the aspect of everything that he quite
forgot that any explanation at all was necessary, and, after gazing
at her for a few moments while his eyes, wet with a tenderness new and
deliciously sweet, roved fondly from her head to her little slipper,
doating on each feature, he just put out his arms to take her with some
old familiar phrase of love on his lips.

She sprang away, her eye flashing with anger.

He looked so much taken aback and discomfited that she paused in mere
wonder, as she was about to rush from the room.

"Annie, what does this mean?" he stammered. "Oh, yes,--why,--my
darling, don't you know,--did n't you guess,--it was all a joke,--
a stupid joke? I 've just been pretending."

It was not a very lucid explanation, but she understood, though only to
be plunged in greater amazement.

"But what for?" she murmured.

"I did n't know I loved you," he said slowly, as if recalling with
difficulty, and from a great distance, his motives, "and I thought it
was kind to cure you of your love for me by pretending to be a fool.
I think I must have been crazy, don't you?" and he smiled in a dazed,
deprecating way.

Her face from being very pale began to flush. First a red spot started
out in either cheek; then they spread till they covered the cheeks; next
her forehead took a roseate hue, and down her neck the tide of color
rushed, and she stood there before him a glowing statue of outraged
womanhood, while in the midst her eyes sparkled with scorn.

"You wanted to cure me," she said at last, in slow, concentrated tones,
"and you have succeeded. You have insulted me as no woman was ever
insulted before."

She paused as if to control herself; for her voice trembled with
the last words. She shivered, and her bosom heaved once or twice
convulsively. Her features quivered; scorching tears of shame rushed to
her eyes, and she burst out hysterically:--

"For pity's sake never let me see you again!"

And then he found himself alone.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Potts's Painless Cure, by Edward Bellamy

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