impulse of friendliness had been killed; she once more,
as I saw only too plainly, felt for me that sense of repulsion, felt for
herself that sense of self-degradation.

"I _can not_ marry you!" she muttered.

"You can--and will--and must," I cried, infuriated by her look.

There was a long silence. I could easily guess what was being fought out in
her mind. At last she slowly drew herself up. "I can not refuse," she said,
and her eyes sparkled with defiance that had hate in it. "You have the
power to compel me. Use it, like the brute you refuse to let me forget that
you are." She looked so young, so beautiful, so angry--and so tempting.

"So I shall!" I answered. "Children have to be taught what is good for
them. Call in your mother, and we'll tell her the news."

Instead, she went into the next room. I followed, saw Mrs. Ellersly seated
at the tea-table in the corner farthest from the library where her daughter
and I had been negotiating. She was reading a letter, holding her lorgnon
up to her painted eyes.

"Won't you give us tea, mother?" said Anita, on her surface not a trace of
the cyclone that must still have been raging hi her.

"Congratulate me, Mrs. Ellersly," said I. "Your daughter has consented to
marry me."

Instead of speaking, Mrs. Ellersly began to cry--real tears. And for a
moment I thought there was a real heart inside of her somewhere. But when
she spoke, that delusion vanished.

"You must forgive me, Mr. Blacklock," she said in her hard, smooth, politic
voice. "It is the shock of realizing I'm about to lose my daughter." And
I knew that her tears were from joy and relief--Anita had "come up to the
scratch;" the hideous menace of "genteel poverty" had been averted.

"Do give us tea, mama," said Anita. Her cold, sarcastic tone cut my nerves
and her mother's like a razor blade. I looked sharply at her, and wondered
whether I was not making a bargain vastly different from that my passion
was picturing.

XV. SOME STRANGE LAPSES OF A LOVER

But before there was time for me to get a distinct impression, that ugly
shape of cynicism had disappeared.

"It was a shadow I myself cast upon her," I assured myself; and once more
she seemed to me like a clear, calm lake of melted snow from the mountains.
"I can see to the pure white sand of the very bottom," thought I. Mystery
there was, but only the mystery of wonder at the apparition of such beauty
and purity in such a world as mine. True, fr