envy those
commonplace men because their bodies move easily from place to place.
Can their minds soar up like yours?"

"Perhaps not--nor sink into such depths."

She rose, to approach the long window against which the night had
plastered its blackness. He watched her inevitably graceful passage
from the light into the shadows, and her nervous attitude, as she stood
with averted face, staring out through the lustrous glass. She was
glamorous with the material elegance that always ended by deriding him.
She was agitated by who knew what secret thoughts in accordance with
that involuntary withdrawal--the movement of a prisoner toward the
window of a cell.

"Let's not deny the facts of life," he began again. "Or pretend with
each other. Pity doesn't make one incorporeal. All your angelic
compassion can't transform you from a woman into an angel, especially
when you see, at every glance in your mirror, the charms that a moment
of generosity has made futile."

She came to him quickly, knelt down beside the wheel chair, and put
round him her bare, slender arms.

"Don't you know that I love you, David?"

"There are so many kinds of love," he sighed, gazing at her dark eyes
that once had flamed with passion, at her fragile lips that had uttered
such words as he was never to hear, at her whole pale-brown countenance
that would never express for him what it had expressed for the other.

"I want nothing else," she affirmed, in a voice wherein no one could
have found any insincerity.

"Perhaps you believe even that. But when it comes to you, then you'll
realize what a trap I've caught you in." He gave her a look of horror.
"Why did you go there that afternoon to Brantome's? When you saw me
there, sitting alone in the shadows, dying with no weight on my
conscience, why didn't you leave me alone? But maybe you had no idea
of the effect you were going to produce on me--that your look, and
voice, and mind, were what I'd always been waiting for. Or since you
had come there why couldn't my conscience die at the moment when you
made me live again? But instead of dying, my conscience is becoming
more and more alive."

He bit his lips to keep back a groan. She declared:

"You're harming yourself again. You won't be able to work to-morrow."

"What is my work worth, if it dooms you to this?" Presently he said in
a quiet tone, "It would be easy to free you."

"Ah, you are horrible!"

"Don't be afraid. If there is