of a painful scene. But leave
you must--at once."

She looked wildly round, clasped her hands, suddenly burst into tears.
If she had but known, she could have had her own way after that, without
any attempt from me to oppose her. For she was evidently unutterably
wretched--and no one knew better than I the sufferings of unreturned love.
But she had given me up; slowly, sobbing, she left the room, I opening the
door for her and closing it behind her.

"I almost broke down myself," said I to Anita. "Poor woman! How can you be
so calm? You women in your relations with each other are--a mystery."

"I have only contempt for a woman who tries to hold a man when he wishes
to go," said Anita, with quiet but energetic bitterness. "Besides"--she
hesitated an instant before going on--"Gladys deserves her fate. She
doesn't really care for him. She's only jealous of him. She never did love
him."

"How do you know?" said I sharply, trying to persuade myself it was not an
ugly suspicion in me that lifted its head and shot out that question.

"Because he never loved her," she replied. "The feeling a woman has for
a man or a man for a woman, without any response, isn't love, isn't
worthy the name of love. It's a sort of baffled covetousness. Love means
generosity, not greediness." Then--"Why do you not ask me whether what she
said is true?"

The change in her tone with that last sentence, the strange, ominous note
in it, startled me,

"Because," replied I, "as I said to her, to ask my wife such a question
would be to insult her. If you were riding with him, it was an accident."
As if my rude repulse of her overtures and my keeping away from her ever
since would not have justified her in almost anything.

She flushed the dark red of shame, but her gaze held steady and unflinching
upon mine. "It was not altogether by accident," she said. And I think she
expected me to kill her.

When a man admits and respects a woman's rights where he is himself
concerned, he either is no longer interested in her or has begun to love
her so well that he can control the savage and selfish instincts of
passion. If Mowbray Langdon had been there, I might have killed them both;
but he was not there, and she, facing me without fear, was not the woman to
be suspected of the stealthy and traitorous.

"It was he that you meant when you warned me you cared for another man?"
said I, so quietly that I wondered at myself; wondered what had become of
the "