ch cry, each act, calls
into being, perhaps very soon, perhaps very late, a repetition?"

"From the same person?"

"Or from some other person."

"What a curious idea. You think we cannot ever do anything without
finding an imitator! I don't like to imagine it. I don't fancy that
there can ever, in the history of the world, be an exact repetition of
our feeling, our doing, to-night."

"Yet, there may be. Who knows?"

"I do. Instinct tells me there never can. There has never been, never
will be, any woman with a heart just like mine, given to a man just in
the same way as mine is given to you. Why should you think such a
hateful thing?"

"I don't know. It was only an idea that occurred to me."

And again he glanced towards the lighted windows.

"The world is very full of echoes," he went on; "our troubles are
repeated."

"But not our joys, our deepest joys. No, no, never!"

"There have always been lovers, and they all act in much the same way!"

"Hateful! Ah! why can't we invent some new mode of expression for
ourselves--you and I?"

"Because we are human beings, and one network of tangled limitations."

"You make me cry with anger," she said.

And when he looked, he saw that there were tears shining in her eyes.

At that moment a ghastly sensation of compunction swept over him. What
had he done? A deep wrong, the deepest wrong man can do. He had made an
experiment, as a scientist may make an experiment. He had vivisected a
soul, but the soul was yet ignorant of the fact. When it knew, would it
die? But then he told himself he had to do it. For he loved
passionately, and was certain that he could only gain the heart he had
not yet completely won by gaining this heart that he had completely won.
He had made an experiment. If it failed! But it could not fail. All that
Clarice said, all that she thought, all that she desired, Betty said,
thought, desired. After the necessary interval the echo must follow the
voice. And he smiled to himself.

"Why do you smile like that?" Clarice asked.

"Because--because I thought I heard an echo," he replied. And then they
kissed again. He, with his eyes shut, forced his imagination to tell him
that the lips he pressed were the lips of Betty. She thought only of the
lips of love, that burn up all the recollections of the lonely years,
all the phantoms which dwell in the deserts through which women pass to
joy--or to despair.

The Austrian pianist was exhausted. Even h