as
very frightful." "No doubt," I said, exasperated at being in the dark;
"but have you forgiven him?" He looked at me queerly. "You shall hear,"
he said, and opening the door, absolutely pushed me in.

'You know Stein's big house and the two immense reception-rooms,
uninhabited and uninhabitable, clean, full of solitude and of shining
things that look as if never beheld by the eye of man? They are cool
on the hottest days, and you enter them as you would a scrubbed cave
underground. I passed through one, and in the other I saw the girl
sitting at the end of a big mahogany table, on which she rested her
head, the face hidden in her arms. The waxed floor reflected her dimly
as though it had been a sheet of frozen water. The rattan screens were
down, and through the strange greenish gloom made by the foliage of the
trees outside a strong wind blew in gusts, swaying the long draperies
of windows and doorways. Her white figure seemed shaped in snow; the
pendent crystals of a great chandelier clicked above her head like
glittering icicles. She looked up and watched my approach. I was chilled
as if these vast apartments had been the cold abode of despair.

'She recognised me at once, and as soon as I had stopped, looking down
at her: "He has left me," she said quietly; "you always leave us--for
your own ends." Her face was set. All the heat of life seemed withdrawn
within some inaccessible spot in her breast. "It would have been easy to
die with him," she went on, and made a slight weary gesture as if giving
up the incomprehensible. "He would not! It was like a blindness--and yet
it was I who was speaking to him; it was I who stood before his eyes;
it was at me that he looked all the time! Ah! you are hard, treacherous,
without truth, without compassion. What makes you so wicked? Or is it
that you are all mad?"

'I took her hand; it did not respond, and when I dropped it, it hung
down to the floor. That indifference, more awful than tears, cries, and
reproaches, seemed to defy time and consolation. You felt that nothing
you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain.

'Stein had said, "You shall hear." I did hear. I heard it all, listening
with amazement, with awe, to the tones of her inflexible weariness.
She could not grasp the real sense of what she was telling me, and her
resentment filled me with pity for her--for him too. I stood rooted to
the spot after she had finished. Leaning on her arm, she s