norna----"

"No, I am not unkind. Your love is young, fierce, inconstant; half
terrible, half boyish, aflame to-day, asleep to-morrow, ready to turn
into hatred at one moment, to melt into tears at the next, intermittent,
unstable as water, fleeting as a cloud's shadow on the mountain side--"

"It pleased you once," said Israel Kafka in broken tones. "It is not
less love because you are weary of it, and of me."

"Weary, you say? No, not weary--and very truly not of you. You will
believe that to-day, to-morrow, you will still try to force life into
your belief--and then it will be dead and gone like all thoughts which
have never entered into the shapes of reality. We have not loved each
other. We have but fancied that it would be sweet to love, and the knife
of truth has parted the web of our dreams, keenly, in the midst, so that
we see before us what is, though the ghost of what might have been is
yet lingering near."

"Who wove that web, Unorna? You, or I?" He lifted his heavy eyes and
gazed at her coiled hair.

"What matters it whether it was your doing or mine? But we wove it
together--and together we must see the truth."

"If this is true, there is no more 'together' for you and me."

"We may yet glean friendship in the fields where love has grown."

"Friendship! The very word is a wound! Friendship! The very dregs and
lees of the wine of life! Friendship! The sour drainings of the heart's
cup, left to moisten the lips of the damned when the blessed have drunk
their fill! I hate the word, as I hate the thought!"

Unorna sighed, partly, perhaps, that he might hear the sigh, and put
upon it an interpretation soothing to his vanity, but partly, too,
from a sincere regret that he should need to suffer as he was evidently
suffering. She had half believed that she loved him, and she owed him
pity. Women's hearts pay such debts unwillingly, but they do pay them,
nevertheless. She wished that she had never set eyes upon Israel Kafka;
she wished that she might never see him again; even his death would
hardly have cost her a pang, and yet she was sorry for him. Diana, the
huntress, shot her arrows with unfailing aim; Diana, the goddess, may
have sighed and shed one bright immortal tear, as she looked into the
fast-glazing eyes of the dying stag--may not Diana, the maiden, have
felt a touch of human sympathy and pain as she listened to the deep note
of her hounds baying on poor Actaeon's track! No one is all bad, or a