not to know it. I tried not
to believe it. I argued with myself, laughed at myself, invented a
hundred explanations of this cruel thing that was gnawing at my heart
and giving me no peace night or day. Why, man, Ogilvie, I have read
'Pendennis!' Would you think it possible that any one who has read
'Pendennis' could ever fall in love with an actress?"

He jumped to his feet again, walked up and down for a second or two,
twisting the while a bit of casting-line round his finger so that it
threatened to cut into the flesh.

"But I will tell you now, Ogilvie--now that I am speaking to any one
about it," said he--and he spoke in a rapid, deep, earnest voice,
obviously not caring much what his companion might think, so that he
could relieve his overburdened mind--"that it was not any actress I fell
in love with. I never saw her in a theatre but that once. I hated the
theatre whenever I thought of her in it. I dared scarcely open a
newspaper, lest I should see her name. I turned away from the posters in
the streets: when I happened by some accident to see her publicly
paraded that way, I shuddered all through--with shame, I think; and I
got to look on her father as a sort of devil that had been allowed to
drive about that beautiful creature in vile chains. Oh, I cannot tell
you! When I have heard him talking away in that infernal, cold, precise
way about her duties to her art, and insisting that she should have no
sentiments or feelings of her own, and that she should simply use every
emotion as a bit of something to impose on the public--a bit of her
trade, an exposure of her own feelings to make people clap their
hands--I have sat still and wondered at myself that I did not jump up
and catch him by the throat, and shake the life out of his miserable
body."

"You have cut your hand, Macleod."

He shook a drop or two of blood off.

"Why, Ogilvie, when I saw you on the bridge of the steamer, I nearly
went mad with delight. I said to myself, 'Here is some one who has seen
her and spoken to her, who will know when I tell him.' And now that I am
telling you of it, Ogilvie, you will see--you will understand--that it
is not any actress I have fallen in love with--it was not the
fascination of an actress at all, but the fascination of the woman
herself; the fascination of her voice, and her sweet ways, and the very
way she walked, too, and the tenderness of her heart. There was a sort
of wonder about her; whatever she did or