o you think I could have done otherwise?" I inquired.

"I think if I were a man, and a woman had come across the mountains--"
she halted suddenly and colored. Then she added in an altered tone of
flat indifference, "It doesn't matter."

For a moment I stood there with no answer to frame. Her words bewildered
me. So she might have spoken had she been free or affianced to me. I was
standing above her looking down and her eyes, with the same pained
wideness, were looking at some picture which the flickering flames and
white embers held for her imagination. Then I understood. Her words were
not after all really addressed to me. She, too, was thinking of the man
asleep in the huge four-post bed who had not awakened to receive her,
and upon me was falling the expression of what was in her heart because
I was the only person with whom she could speak. Since he had not
aroused himself she had noticed my absence. Had it been otherwise I
should have been forgotten. It was the final note of my quaint and
unprecedented torture that I should come in as her husband's proxy for a
chiding that should have been his.

For the next few moments I stood helplessly silent. Outside I heard the
distant baying of hounds off on some ungoverned chase. She sat there
while the longings in my heart welled and the reason in my brain reeled,
until I could feel only one thing--that she should belong to me; that my
arms should enfold her--that everything which balked that end was a
monstrous and hideous injustice. Then as a drunken man may suddenly sink
into the irresponsible vagueness that carries him into total
irresponsibility, the tidal wave mastered me. There was an inarticulate
sound in my throat; something between a groan and a sob, which must have
startled her, for she looked suddenly up, and as she did so I dropped to
my knees beside her and carried both her hands to my lips. She flinched
back with a sudden little start of astonishment, but I was now the
primitive creature bereft of sanity and I gathered her to me and
crushed her in my arms and covered the cool softness of her cheeks and
eyes and lips with my kisses until they flushed hot and crimson. In an
instant the thing was over. A wave of returning reason swept me like a
sluicing from a bucket of ice-water, and I came to my feet sane and
unspeakably mortified. She was still sitting very silent and her flushed
color had at once died to pallor. Her eyes were wide with mystified
incomprehe