hen--"

She passed one slim hand over her face--"then you will shake yourself
free from this dream of me; then, awake, my punishment at your hands
will begin. ... Dear, no man in his right senses can continue to love a
girl such as I am. All that is true and ardent and generous in you has
invested my physical attractiveness and my small intellect with a
magic that cannot last, because it is magic; and you are the magician,
enmeshed for the moment in the mists of your own enchantment. When this
fades, when you unclose your eyes in clear daylight, dear, I dread to
think what I shall appear to you--what a dreadful, shrunken, bloodless
shell, hung with lace and scented, silken cerements--a jewelled
mummy-case--a thing that never was! ... Do you understand my punishment a
little, now?"

"If it were true," he said in a dull voice, "you will have forgotten,
too."

"I pray I may," she said under her breath.

And, after a long silence: "Do you think, before the year is out, that
you might be granted enough courage?" he asked.

"No. I shall not even pray for it. I want what is offered me! I desire
it so blindly that already it has become part of me. I tell you the
poison is in every vein; there is nothing else but poison in me. I am
what I tell you, to the core. It is past my own strength of will to stop
me, now. If I am stopped, another must do it. My weakness for you,
being a treachery if not confessed, I was obliged to confess, horribly
frightened as I was. He might have stopped me; he did not. ... And now,
what is there on earth to halt me? Love cannot. Common decency and
courage cannot. Fear of your unhappiness and mine cannot. No, even the
certitude of your contempt, some day, is powerless to halt me now. I
could not love; I am utterly incapable of loving you enough to balance
the sacrifice. And that is final."

Grace Ferrall came into the room and found a duel of silence in progress
under the dull fire-glow tinting the ceiling.

"Another quarrel," she commented, turning on the current of the
drop-light above the desk from which Siward had risen at her entrance.
"You quarrel enough to marry. Why don't you?"

"I wish we could," said Sylvia simply.

Grace laughed. "What a little fool you are!" she said tenderly, seating
herself in Siward's chair and dropping one hand over his where it rested
on the arm. "Stephen, can't you make her--a big, strong fellow like you?
Oh, well; on your heads be it! My conscience is no