her that day? What, during the
foregoing weeks, she had tried not to hear; what had sounded in her
ears like the tone of a sunken bell, was there at last, horrible and
deafening. She had ceased to care for him, and ceased, surfeited with
abundance, with the same vehement abruptness as she had once begun. The
swiftness with which things had swept to a conclusion, had,
confessedly, been accelerated by her unhappy temperament; but, however
gentle the gradient, the point for which they made would have remained
the same. What she was now forced to recognise was, that the whole
affair had been no more than an episode; and the fact of its having
begun less brutally than others, had not made it a whit better able
than these to withstand decay.

A bitter sense of humiliation came over her. What was she? Not a week
ago--she could count the days on her fingers--the mere touch of his
hand on her hair had made her thrill; and now the sole feeling she was
conscious of was one of dislike. She looked back over the course of her
relations with him, and many things, unclear before, became plain to
her. She had gone into the intimacy deliberately, with open eyes,
knowing that she cared for him only in a friendly way. She had
believed, then, that the gift of herself would mean little to her,
while it would secure her a friend and companion. And then, too--she
might as well be quite honest with herself--she had nourished a
romantic hope that a love which commenced as did this shy, adoring
tenderness, would give her something finer and more enduring than she
had hitherto known. Wrong, all wrong, from beginning to end! It had
been no better than those loves which made no secret of their aim and
did not strut about draped in false sentiment. The end of all was one
and the same. But besides this, it had come to mean more to her than
she had ever dreamt of allowing. You could not play with fire, it
seemed, and not be burned. Or, at least, she could not. She was branded
with wounds. The fierce demands in her, over which she had no control,
had once more reared their heads and got the mastery of her, and of
him, too. There had been no chance, beneath their scorching breath, for
a pallid delicacy of feeling.

It did not cross her mind that she would conceal what she felt from
him. Secrecy implied a mental ingenuity, a tiresome care of word and
deed. His eyes must be opened; he, too, must learn to say the horrid
word "end." How infinitely thankful