ars. His
heart beat in heavy laboured, measured strokes, like the tolling of a
death-bell. He saw her cover her face with her hands, and drop upon her
knees amongst the grasses that greenly clothed the red soil. He saw the
butterfly, startled from its feast, rise and waver away. And he saw, too,
his veiled nymph, his virginal white goddess, his chaste, veiled maiden
Artemis, toppled from her pedestal and lying in the gutter.

Her sorrow the sorrow of those spotted ones! her wrong theirs, and theirs
her shame!... So this was the sordid secret that haunted the depths of
those eyes--the eyes of Beatrice! He turned his head away, so as not to
look upon her, and his face grew dark with the rush of blood. But still he
heard her speaking, as a man hears in a dream.

"At school all the older girls thought and talked of nothing but Love, and
most of the younger ones did the same.... And I, who knew the dreadful,
cruel, hideous side of the thing that each of them set up and
worshipped--I who shuddered when a man's breath, and a man's voice, and a
man's face came near--I said in my heart that Love should never find a
dupe and a slave and a tool in me. I meant to live for the Mother, and be
to those poor sisters of mine what she was--oh, my darling! my
darling!--to me! And all the while Love was coming nearer and nearer, and
at last----"

She swept the tears from her face with the palms of her slight open hands,
and drew a deep, shuddering breath, and went on brokenly, with sobs
between the gasped-out sentences:

"--At last it came. I never tried to struggle against it; it wrapped me in
a net of exquisite sweet softness, that held me like a cage of steel. I
gave myself up to the blissfulness and the joy of it. I was unfaithful to
those others--I forgot them for Beauvayse! Oh, why should Love make it so
easy to do unlovely things? to be unworthy, to break promises, and to be
false to vows? You are in earnest when you make them ... you are proud to
be so sure that nothing shall change or turn you.... Then eyes that are
like strange jewels look deep into yours. A voice that is like no other
voice whispers at your ear. It says strange, sweet, secret things--things
that come back and burn you--and his breath upon your cheek drowns out
your scruples in wave upon wave of magical, thrilling, wonderful
sensation!..." She shuddered. "And everything else is blotted out, and no
one else matters! You are not even sorry that you have left off