he reddening sky.

"I'm what he's made me--and I've got to let her alone. . . . Let
her alone. I--" He halted, laid his hand heavily on the door,
standing so, motionless.

"If I--go--near her, he'll tell her what I am. If he didn't, I'd
have to tell her. There's no way--anywhere--for me. And _he_ made
me so. . . . And--by God! it's in me--in me--to--to--if she writes
again--" He straightened up, turned the key calmly, and let himself
in.

Burgess was asleep, but Berkley went into his room and awoke him,
shining a candle in his eyes.

"Burgess!"

"S-sir?"

"Suppose you knew you could never marry a woman. Would you keep
away from her? Or would you do as much as you could to break her
heart first?"

Burgess yawned: "Yes, sir."

"You'd do all you could?"

"Yes, sir."

There was a long silence; then Berkley laughed. "They drowned the
wrong pup," he said pleasantly. "Good night."

But Burgess was already asleep again.

CHAPTER IX

And now at last she knew what it was she feared. For she was
beginning to understand that this man was utterly unworthy, utterly
insensible, without character, without one sympathetic trait that
appealed to anything in her except her senses.

She understood it now, lying there alone in her room, knowing it to
be true, admitting it in all the bitter humiliation of
self-contempt. But even in the light of this new self-knowledge
her inclination for him seemed a thing so unreasonable, so
terrible, that, confused and terrified by the fear of spiritual
demoralisation, she believed that this bewildering passion was all
that he had ever evoked in her, and fell sick in mind and body for
the shame of it.

A living fever was on her night and day; disordered memories of him
haunted her, waking; defied her, sleeping; and her hatred for what
he had awakened in her grew as her blind, childish longing to see
him grew, leaving no peace for her.

What kind of love was that?--founded on nothing, nurtured on
nothing, thriving on nothing except what her senses beheld in him.
Nothing higher, nothing purer, nothing more exalted had she ever
learned of him than what her eyes saw; and they had seen only a man
in his ripe youth, without purpose, without ideals, taking
carelessly of the world what he would one day return to it--the
material, born in corruption, and to corruption doomed.

It was night she feared most. By day there were duties awaiting,
or to be invented. Also,