y lightly, as if she were
indeed a wounded child that he was afraid of hurting.

"Forgive me.... I can't help it...." she kept murmuring. "To find you
alive ... alive...."

The words choked into sobs. He stood holding her in that light, gentle
embrace silently. He could not have spoken though both their lives
depended on it. Presently she lifted her head from his breast and
glanced up at him. His face awed her. There was a look on it that made
it quite beautiful and rather strange. The look of one who sees with
other than bodily vision.

When she said timidly a moment later that she must be going now, he did
not try to detain her, only lifted the hand that had lain upon his
breast, and held it to his lips, then to his eyes a moment.

* * * * *

In some natures tenderness springs from passion; in others passion can
only flower from tenderness. Sophy was of the latter type. With all her
capacity for suffering, she could never have felt the excoriating pain
of the being bound by sensual fascination to another whom it knows to
be despicable. This quality in the very essence of her nature was the
secret of her ardent ventures in love and her equally ardent recoils
from it.

But though her present love for Amaldi was all tenderness there was in
it also such anguish as passion sometimes brings. Pure as it was, almost
mystic in its exaltation, it yet shamed her to herself. Was she then the
sort of woman who loves, and loves and loves indefinitely? She fought
her way out of this doubt, only to stand confounded and miserable before
the bald fact that she had had two husbands, one of whom was still
living, and yet, that in a future no matter how vague and distant, she
contemplated taking another. "It must be a long, long time...." she had
written Amaldi after those moments in Clarges Street. "Years and years,
perhaps. It isn't that I shrink from you, my dear one--oh, you know
that!--but from the thought of marriage with any one. I can't help it,
dearest. I told you that you would need all your patience with me----
Yes-- I shall try you sorely I'm afraid. I wonder--but no--when I think
of your love for me, I feel that I have never before known real love.
And see how selfish I am with you! This is your reward--a cruel egoist,
who can't give you up--who can't give you herself. That is the truth,
Marco. It isn't that I will not-- I _cannot_. Besides----"

Here she had laid aside her pen in despai