nly sorry for me. But you found out that you
were alive enough to be jealous after all, and that you could not really
forgive me, and then you hated me."

"Kitty--you know that you do not believe what you are saying."

"Can you deny that if you had been going to live you would not have
forgiven me?"

"I can. I could have forgiven. But then, as I said to you--that day,
Kitty, on the lawn,--it would have been more difficult to save you."

"Your love, then, was a pretence to save me!"

"Nothing was pretence, at first," he answered her patiently. "At first I
was only glad for your sake that I was going to be out of the way so
soon; and when I found that you could care for me again I was glad that
I had still a month to live with you."

His words smote on her heart like stones. He saw it and yearned over her
pain; but such yearning, such dispassionate tenderness was, he knew, the
poison in her veins that maddened her.

She looked, now, at last, at the truth. He had not put it into words,
but with the abandonment of her specious hope she saw and spoke it.

"It was, then, because it was only for a month."

He hesitated, seeing, too. "That I was glad?"

"That you loved me."

Across the room, in a long silence, they looked at each other. And in
the silence another truth came to him, cruel, clear, salutary.

"Wasn't it, perhaps, for both of us, because it was only for a month?"

The shock went as visibly through her as though it had, indeed,
been a stone hurled at her breast. "You mean--you mean--" she
stammered--"Oh--you don't believe that I love you--You believe that it
could pass, with me, as it has with you!" She threw herself into the
chair, casting her arms on the back, burying her face in them.

Holland, timidly, approached her. He was afraid of the revelation he
must make. "I believe that you do love me, Kitty, and that I love you;
but not in the way we thought. We neither of us could go on loving like
that; it was because it was only for a month that we thought we could.
It wasn't real."

"Oh," she sobbed, "that is the difference--the cruel difference. You
love me in that terrible way--the way that could give me up and not
mind; but I am in love with you;--that's the dreadful difference. Men
get over it; but women are always in love."

Perhaps Kitty saw further than he did. Holland was abashed before the
helpless revelation of a mysterious and alien sorrow. For women the
brooding dream; for men the act