ot touch me? What am
I to understand----"

"That from henceforth you are free from the persecution of my love,"
says Dysart deliberately. "I was mad ever to hope that you could care
for me--still--I did hope. That has been my undoing. But now----"

"Well?" demands she faintly. Her whole being seems stunned. Something of
all this she had anticipated, but the reality is far worse than any
anticipation had been. She had seen him in her thoughts, angry,
indignant, miserable, but that he should thus coldly set her aside--bid
her an everlasting adieu--be able to make up his mind deliberately to
forget her--this--had never occurred to her as being even probable.

"Now you are to understand that the idiotic farce played between us two
the day before yesterday is at an end? The curtain is down. It is over.
It was a failure--neither you, nor I, nor the public will ever hear of
it again."

"Is this--because I did not come home last evening in the rain and
storm?" Some small spark of courage has come back to her now. She lifts
her head and looks at him.

"Oh! be honest with me here, in our last hour together," cries he
vehemently. "You have cheated me all through--be true to yourself for
once. Why pretend it is my fault that we part? Yesterday I implored you
not to go for that drive with him, and yet--you went. What was I--or my
love for you in comparison with a few hours' drive with that lying
scoundrel?"

"It was only the drive I thought of," says she piteously. "I--there was
nothing else, indeed. And you; if"--raising her hand to her throat as if
suffocating--"if you had not spoken so roughly--so----"

"Pshaw!" says Dysart, turning from her as if disgusted. To him, in his
present furious mood, her grief, her fear, her shrinkings, are all so
many movements in the game of coquette, at which she is a past mistress.
"Will you think me a fool to the end?" says he. "See here," turning his
angry eyes to hers. "I don't care what you say, I know you now. Too
late, indeed--but still I know you! To the very core of your heart you
are one mass of deceit."

A little spasm crosses her face. She leans back heavily against the
table behind her. "Oh, no, no," she says in a voice so low as to be
almost unheard.

"You will deny, of course," says he mercilessly. "You would even have me
believe that you regret the past--but you, and such as you never regret.
Man is your prey! So many scalps to your belt is all you think about.
Why," with