n, as if her first glance must have been
deluded, for, surely, there must be some outward sign that Mary was
talking in an excited, or bewildered, or fantastic manner. No; she still
frowned, as if she sought her way through the clauses of a difficult
argument, but she still looked more like one who reasons than one who
feels.

"That proves that you're mistaken--utterly mistaken," said Katharine,
speaking reasonably, too. She had no need to verify the mistake by a
glance at her own recollections, when the fact was so clearly stamped
upon her mind that if Ralph had any feeling towards her it was one of
critical hostility. She did not give the matter another thought, and
Mary, now that she had stated the fact, did not seek to prove it, but
tried to explain to herself, rather than to Katharine, her motives in
making the statement.

She had nerved herself to do what some large and imperious instinct
demanded her doing; she had been swept on the breast of a wave beyond
her reckoning.

"I've told you," she said, "because I want you to help me. I don't want
to be jealous of you. And I am--I'm fearfully jealous. The only way, I
thought, was to tell you."

She hesitated, and groped in her endeavor to make her feelings clear to
herself.

"If I tell you, then we can talk; and when I'm jealous, I can tell you.
And if I'm tempted to do something frightfully mean, I can tell you;
you could make me tell you. I find talking so difficult; but loneliness
frightens me. I should shut it up in my mind. Yes, that's what I'm
afraid of. Going about with something in my mind all my life that never
changes. I find it so difficult to change. When I think a thing's wrong
I never stop thinking it wrong, and Ralph was quite right, I see, when
he said that there's no such thing as right and wrong; no such thing, I
mean, as judging people--"

"Ralph Denham said that?" said Katharine, with considerable indignation.
In order to have produced such suffering in Mary, it seemed to her that
he must have behaved with extreme callousness. It seemed to her that he
had discarded the friendship, when it suited his convenience to do so,
with some falsely philosophical theory which made his conduct all the
worse. She was going on to express herself thus, had not Mary at once
interrupted her.

"No, no," she said; "you don't understand. If there's any fault it's
mine entirely; after all, if one chooses to run risks--"

Her voice faltered into silence. It w