"Not deliberately, of course. Only after you had been hounded, like a
little white cat, into a corner. By some one who wanted you for an image,
merely, that he himself could attribute all the appropriate thoughts and
desires to. I can imagine you turning, at last, and rending him;--limb
from limb, if you like."

She gazed at him, wide-eyed, for a long moment; then she drooped forward
over the table and cradled her head in her arms. With his hands he tried
to comfort her but he felt that they were clumsy and ineffectual.

"I've hurt you horribly," he said, when he could command his voice.
"Probing in like that."

This must be the unendurable tragedy she had referred to a while ago.
She was speaking, voicelessly and he bent down to listen.

"... if you knew the comfort! I suppose I ought to be frightened--at your
guessing like that, but it seems natural, to-night, that you should.--You
know who it was, don't you?"

"Yes," he told her confidently. "It happened just to-day, didn't it?"

"It was yesterday he asked me to marry him," she said. "That wasn't
hounding. He had a right to, I mean. I thought I would marry him, once. I
told him I would if I could. I meant, I would if I could make him
understand what I really was. He thought I meant something altogether
different, something that his image of me might have meant quite nicely.
Yesterday when he asked me again, I flew into a fury and told him what I
am really like. I needn't have done it. I could have told him that the
reason I wouldn't marry him was because I was in love with you. That
would have been true--in a way. I mean, it wasn't the reason in the
beginning; nor even after I was in love with you--so long as you didn't
know. But I never thought of telling him that. I just wanted to--smash
that image of his. And I did. I knew it was cruel when I did it, but not
how terrible until this morning when Rush got a letter from him."

She had to stop there to master a sob. He went around the table and took
her in his arms. "Come over to the big chair," he said, "where I
can--hold you. I can't let you go on like this. You can tell me the rest
of it there."

She released herself from his hands by taking them in her own and
pressing them for a moment tight. Then she let them go.

"I couldn't," she said. "I couldn't be comforted like that while I was
telling you about him."

He understood instantly. "That's like you," he commented. "You're always
like yourself, thank