n immense, a terrific feeling of desolation poured over
her, as if from above, coming down upon her in the dark. It was like
a flood that stiffened into ice upon her, making her body and her soul
numb for a moment.

"I've never mattered to any one."

She muttered the words to herself. As she did so Artois seemed again to
be looking into the magic mirror of the _fattura della morte_, to see
the pale man, across whose face the shadow of a palm-leaf shifted,
turning on his bed towards a woman who stood by an open door.

"You have always mattered to me," he said.

As he spoke there was in his voice that peculiar ring of utter sincerity
which can no more be simulated, or mistaken, than the ringing music of
sterling gold. But perhaps she was not in a condition to hear rightly,
or perhaps something within her chose to deny, had a lust for denial
because denial hurt her.

"To you least of all," she said. "Only yourself has ever really mattered
to you."

In a sentence she summed up the long catalogue that had been given to
him by her silence.

His whole body felt as if it reddened. His skin tingled with a sort
of physical anger. His mature pride that had grown always, as a strong
man's natural pride does grow with the passing of the years, seemed to
him instinctively to rush forward to return the blow that had been dealt
it.

"That is not quite true," he said.

"It is true. I have always had copper and I have always wanted gold,"
she answered.

He controlled himself, to prove to himself that she lied, that he was
not the eternal egoist she dubbed him. Sometimes he had been genuinely
unselfish, sometimes--not often, perhaps, but sometimes--he had really
sunk himself in her. She was not being quite just. But how could she be
quite just to-night? An almost reckless feeling overtook him, a desire
to conquer at all costs in this struggle; to win her back, whether
against her will or not, to her old self; to eliminate the shocking
impression made upon her soul by the discovery of that day, to wipe
it out utterly, to replace it with another; to revive within her that
beautiful enthusiasm which had been as a light always shining for her
and from her upon people and events and life; to make her understand, to
prove to her that, after all allowance has been made for uncertainties
and contradictions of fate, for the ironies, the paradoxes, the
cruelties, the tragedies, and the despairs of existence, the great,
broad fact emer