"I came--"

She held up her white hand with a long-stemmed rose in it--as though a
queen should lift a sceptre.

"You came," she answered, "more to see _me_ than to hear. You made that
blunder."

"You choose to bear yourself like a goddess, and disdain me from Olympian
heights," he said. "I had the wit to guess it would be so."

She shook her royal head, faintly and most strangely smiling.

"That you had not," was her clear-worded answer. "That is a later
thought sprung up since you have seen my face. 'Twas quick--for you--but
not quick enough." And the smile in her eyes was maddening. "You
thought to see a woman crushed and weeping, her beauty bent before you,
her locks dishevelled, her streaming eyes lifted to Heaven--and you--with
prayers, swearing that not Heaven could help her so much as your deigning
magnanimity. You have seen women do this before, you would have seen
_me_ do it--at your feet--crying out that I was lost--lost for ever.
_That_ you expected! 'Tis not here."

Debauched as his youth was, and free from all touch of heart or
conscience--for from his earliest boyhood he had been the pupil of rakes
and fashionable villains--well as he thought he knew all women and their
ways, betraying or betrayed--this creature taught him a new thing, a new
mood in woman, a new power which came upon him like a thunderbolt.

"Gods!" he exclaimed, catching his breath, and even falling back apace,
"Damnation! you are _not_ a woman!"

She laughed again, weaving her roses, but not allowing that his eyes
should loose themselves from hers.

"But now, you called me a goddess and spoke of Olympian heights," she
said; "I am not one--I am a woman who would show other women how to bear
themselves in hours like these. Because I am a woman why should I kneel,
and weep, and rave? What have I lost--in losing you? I should have lost
the same had I been twice your wife. What is it women weep and beat
their breasts for--because they love a man--because they lose his love.
They never have them."

She had finished the wreath, and held it up in the sun to look at it.
What a strange beauty was hers, as she held it so--a heavy, sumptuous
thing--in her white hands, her head thrown backward.

"You marry soon," she asked--"if the match is not broken?"

"Yes," he answered, watching her--a flame growing in his eyes and in his
soul in his own despite.

"It cannot be too soon," she said. And she turned and faced him, holdin