ce loved the man.

"The matter of personal feeling?" he asked.

"Yes. When he left Pursuit, he destroyed the better part of me--what you
would call the good part."

She said that without sentimentalism, without making it a plea for
sympathy; she had better sense, he saw, than to imagine that she could
arouse sympathy on that ground.

"And," she continued, with intense malignity, "what was so monstrous in
my asking him for money? I asked him for no payment of what he really
owes me. That's a debt he can't pay! My beauty, destroyed, withered and
covered over with the hard mask of the features you see now; my
capacity for happiness, dead, swallowed up in my long, long devotion to
my purpose to find him again--those things, man as you are, you realize
are beyond the scope of payment or repayment!"

Without rising to a standing position, she leaned so far forward that
her weight was all on her feet, and, although her figure retained the
posture of one seated on a chair, she was in fact independent of support
from it, and held herself crouching in front of him, taut, a tremor in
her limbs because of the strain.

Her hands were held out toward him, the tips of her stiffened,
half-closed fingers less than a foot from his face. Her brows were drawn
so high that the skin of her forehead twitched, as if pulled upward by
another's hand. It was with difficulty that he compelled himself to
witness the climax of her rage. Only his need of what she knew kept him
still.

"Money!" she said, her lean arms in continual motion before him. "You're
right, there. I wanted money. I made up my mind I'd have it. It was such
a purpose of mine, so strongly grown into my whole being, that even
Mildred's death couldn't lessen or dislodge it. And there was more than
the want of money in my never letting loose of my intention to find
him. He couldn't strip me bare and get away! You've understood me pretty
well. You know it was written, on the books, that he and I should come
together again--no matter how far he went, or how cleverly!

"And I see now!" she gave him her decision, and, as she did so, rose to
an upright position, her hands at her sides going half-shut and open,
half-shut and open, as if she made mental pictures of the closing in of
her long pursuit. "I'll say what you want me to say. Confront him; put
me face to face with him, and I'll say the letter went to him. Oh, never
fear! I'll say the appropriate thing, and the convincing