distended with fear, but fixed upon him in
discerning scorn. She even made no effort to free her wrist, but stood
poised on the brink with an apparent unconcern, that reestablished her
ascendancy as if by magic.

"You 're merely acting now, Tom," she said calmly. "You don't want to
die, and you have no intention of killing me. You 've got too much to
live for, to throw your life away in that fashion. When you 've had
time to think it over, you 'll discover that it was n't love that made
you want me, but ambition. The love was gone long ago, but the
ambition remains. You want to live for that."

He dropped her wrist, and cowered away from the cliff as if he were
shrinking from a nightmare horror, while she began to move slowly in
the direction of the college. The very act of retreat aroused within
her the emotion which, curiously enough, she had not experienced in the
crisis of danger. It was not fear that made her flee, but her flight
that produced the fear; and the possibility of the crime, the grewsome
picture it suggested, flashed upon her with such sinister power that
her knees weakened and caused her to stumble. He overtook her in a few
long strides, and walked beside her in dumb penitence.

"You 'll never forgive me now, Felicity," he said, when he could bear
the silence no longer, "never--never!"

"We 'll not talk of forgiveness any more on either side," she returned
wearily. "We 're merely going round and round in a circle, without
arriving at any conclusion."

His own nature shared her reaction from intense emotion to
indifference, and again silence fell between them. Apparently, they
were scarcely better able to understand each other than if they spoke
in different languages, and each took refuge in incommunicable
thoughts. It would always be thus, she reflected, if they lived
together; no community of interests, herself living in a region apart,
which he was generations short of being able to enter. Nothing would
remain but practical politics, and already she sickened of the sordid
subject. Unionism, public ownership of public utilities versus private
privilege, charges and counter-charges of political corruption,
problems of taxation--such things would constitute his sole interest in
life and the gist of his conversation. It was not enough that he
talked intelligently, even eloquently, on these subjects. Her active
mind had already exhausted their possibilities, and what to her was a
m