e." The young man had tried everything except a Platonic
friendship with a lovely girl. He fancied that he found in Agnes
Carillon that purity coupled with magnetism which makes such experiments
attractive. They corresponded regularly, but they did not meet again for
several months. When he returned, a little tired of platonism,
letter-writing, intellectuality, and longing a great deal for the sight
of her face, he found her engaged to Lord Reckage. So nature revenges
itself. He detected a certain triumph and also a certain deep reproach
in her gaze. She insisted that she was more than happy, but something
under these words seemed to murmur--"You have spoilt our lives." Her
manner, nevertheless, never altered. She was invariably sympathetic,
gracious, delicately emotional. In letters she signed herself, "Yours
affectionately, Agnes Carillon."

"How I should like to paint you in this light!" he said, all at once.
"That is the dress I love best. Don't wear it often." The remark was
slight enough as a pretty speech within the bounds of flirtation, but
the tone in which he uttered it meant more, and the girl's womanly
instinct told her that the dangerous limit in their "friendship" had
been reached. He saw her turn pale. She looked away from him, and
swallowed thoughts which were far more bitter than any words she could
have spoken.

"You never used to say these things," she exclaimed at last; "why do you
say them now?"

"I thought them--always," he answered. "But I am a Pagan. I tried to
keep my Paganism for others, and what you would call 'the best in me'
for you. You may be able to understand. Anyhow, I made a mistake--a
terrible mistake. It was a false position, and I couldn't maintain it.
Now I don't even want to maintain it. Then it was a kind of vanity. I
mean that time when I was at the Palace. I had been reading a lot of
beautiful unreal stuff about the soul. I thought I had reached a very
high place. Of course I had--because nothing is higher or purer than
real human love. But I wouldn't call it love. So I went abroad, and
wrote any amount of 'literature' to you. And all the time Reckage was
here--asking you, wisely enough, to marry him. And you, wisely enough,
accepted him."

Agnes sat still, with her eyes down, cold, silent, forbidding. She did
not understand him. She had neither the knowledge of life, nor the
imagination, which could make such understanding possible. But she saw
in his look that he loved h