HAPTER X

It was mid-afternoon when Lilla emerged from her room.

A servant informed her that "everybody" was motoring or playing golf.
She entered the library, lustrous with its rows of books and its
deep-toned paintings hung against wooden panels. Between half-drawn
window curtains passed rays of sunshine that came to rest upon vases of
flowers arranged in porcelain bowls; but the corners of the room were
steeped in shadows. A man who had been sitting on a couch amid these
shadows rose to his feet.

She sought the gloom beyond the fireplace, in order that her changed
face might not betray her. But even here her paleness was emphasized,
and her eyes, with faint purple streaks below them, took on a look of
deeper anxiety. Her features began to quiver as if her soul were
revealing itself beneath a transparent mask.

"What has happened?"

She managed to reply:

"A great mistake. Because that picture seemed congenial to you in
those lonely places you thought that the original must be the same?
You were wrong. Physically and temperamentally we belong to different
worlds. You couldn't rest in mine, and I couldn't enter yours. If you
knew me," she added, in a hushed voice, "you'd find me contemptible, in
all my weaknesses." She lowered her head, then, raising her eyes,
which were full of fear, besought him, "Tear it out of your heart!
Destroy it!"

"There, it's done. How easy it was to obey you!"

And they stood face to face in a pallor that was like a scintillation
of white-hot metal, both knowing that their lips, though they uttered
first a thousand similar phrases, would presently be united.

Then he came close, catching in his strong grasp her writhing hands.
But she stopped him with a look like a flashing sword--a look as
poignant as though they had been lovers for years and now must love no
longer. And so, in fact, they had been, heart drawn to heart by a
strange likeness of accidental or of fatal events, one longing groping
through space toward another longing. Apart, just by aid of their
imaginations, they had progressed already from indefinite to precise
emotions, from vague to fixed visions, each attaining in thought a
consummation that mocked this present struggle. And this profound
mutual intimacy, an accomplished fact in the realm of mind, was
suddenly projected into the physical atmosphere, so that the glances of
these two, who had just now met each other, clashed in an almost
terrible i