rom even such
amusement as the camp offered? Submit to all his tiresome religious
conversations, and, above all, give up those feverish nights of
excitement? the hazard and the stimulus of the long tables and the
little heaps of gold dust? and her free life, her incomings and
outgoings, with no one to question her? No, it was an impossibility.

The next thing Stephen knew was that she was smiling and looking down
into his eyes, shaking her head.

"No, Stephen, I can't do that. I like you awfully, and should like you
to come and see me; but I wouldn't do for your wife at all, and if you
knew all about me you wouldn't want it either."

Stephen clung fast to her hand.

"What is it that I don't know?" he said desperately, putting, as people
always do, the worst construction he could upon her words, and at the
same time feeling he would forgive her everything, and in a sort of
background in his brain contemplating the figure of the forgiven
Magdalen at the feet of Christ.

Katrine dragged her hand away suddenly. She was not going to tell him
she was a gambler and devoted to the excitement of the tables. She knew
that if she did their pleasant talks in the evenings would be at an end.
He could never come to see her without thinking it his duty to try to
reform her; and as she knew she was not going to reform, what would be
the good of it?

"What does it matter to you? I am not your wife, and am not going to be;
I am an acquaintance. If you like me as I am, very good; if you don't,
no one cares."

Stephen got up and faced her. He was as white as the snow outside.

"You make me think the worst by refusing to confide in me."

Katrine laughed contemptuously.

"I don't care a curse what you think! Haven't I just told you so? Great
heavens," she added, with a burst of conviction, "it would never do for
us to marry! Never! Your one idea is to curtail a person's liberty."

"No," answered Stephen quietly, "not liberty in a general way; only the
liberty to sin and do evil, the liberty to be ignorant and do things
which have terrible consequences that you don't know."

He looked very well at this moment, his pale ascetic face and
sympathetic eyes lighted up with enthusiasm. Katrine looked at him and
then smiled with her quick, impulsive smile.

"Stephen, you are a good man, and perfectly charming at times; but I am
not a good woman, and don't want to be, and we should never get on. So
don't let's bother any more about th