He picked up the book and began to open it, but instantly she had again
flung it away, saying with a degree of ferocity that made him stare in
open-mouthed wonderment:

"If you touch that again, _I'll_ kill _you_!"

It had been her only means of stirring him, and for more than a minute
they remained, as two wax figures, glaring into each other's faces.
Beneath this spell he was rigid, but her young breast rose with quick
pulsations. The room was quiet with that oppressive stillness which
comes in storms, when the elements seem to draw breathlessly aside in
expectation of a crashing bolt of lightning. Now he took a deep breath
and relaxed. She had won, and immediately leaned nearer, never taking
her fixed look from his face.

"This is what comes," she said more calmly, "from imitating Nature. You
once said that we differ from it in no way; that our eyes conceive, our
minds quicken, and our hands destroy, just as it does;--that we in
ourselves are the entire law of the cycles gathered into one piece of
temporal clay. And I let you say it uncontradicted, because in a sense
it was poetic, and because I never dreamed such a philosophy would lead
to this. But I feared all the while that with such theories you were
more unalterably becoming a merciless egoist, yet pinned my faith
somehow to an unseen force to spare you. Now it has failed me. Wait,"
she commanded, thinking he was about to speak. "That Nature-god you copy
might have been one of the beautiful influences in your life, had you
not chosen his cruel and wicked side--the side that asks no one's
pardon, that lives by the survival of the fittest. Oh, you have seen
things so distortedly!--you, whom I had hoped to be proud of, are a
shameless sacrifice upon the altar to this god, Nature! Her reward is
the brand of outcast; you are catalogued in her museum as a vicious
failure, even with all you've accomplished! I shall leave you now, and
doubt if I ever teach you again."

He had sat beneath this tirade until she uttered the last sentence, when
with a heartrending groan of anguish he sprang up and caught her by the
wrists.

"For the love of Christ," he began in a husky voice, but she
passionately interrupted him.

"You dare not speak of Christ! You do not know Him! You have no right to
call His name! Let go of me!"

"Oh, hear me, hear me," he implored her, releasing one of her wrists and
taking the other hand in both his own; alternately stroking it and
almost