thoroughfares that beat on
the edge of the park.

"I didn't know you cared so much," she said, also humbly.

"I didn't," he said. "I was knocked over myself.--But I
care--all the world."

His voice was so quiet and colourless, it made her heart go
pale with fear.

"My love!" she said, drawing near to him. But she spoke out
of fear, not out of love.

"I care all the world--I care for nothing
else--neither in life nor in death," he said, in the same
steady, colourless voice of essential truth.

"Than for what?" she murmured duskily.

"Than for you--to be with me."

And again she was afraid. Was she to be conquered by this?
She cowered close to him, very close to him. They sat perfectly
still, listening to the great, heavy, beating sound of the town,
the murmur of lovers going by, the footsteps of soldiers.

She shivered against him.

"You are cold?" he said.

"A little."

"We will go and have some supper."

He was now always quiet and decided and remote, very
beautiful. He seemed to have some strange, cold power over
her.

They went to a restaurant, and drank chianti. But his pale,
wan look did not go away.

"Don't leave me to-night," he said at length, looking at her,
pleading. He was so strange and impersonal, she was afraid.

"But the people of my place," she said, quivering.

"I will explain to them--they know we are engaged."

She sat pale and mute. He waited.

"Shall we go?" he said at length.

"Where?"

"To an hotel."

Her heart was hardened. Without answering, she rose to
acquiesce. But she was now cold and unreal. Yet she could not
refuse him. It seemed like fate, a fate she did not want.

They went to an Italian hotel somewhere, and had a sombre
bedroom with a very large bed, clean, but sombre. The ceiling
was painted with a bunch of flowers in a big medallion over the
bed. She thought it was pretty.

He came to her, and cleaved to her very close, like steel
cleaving and clinching on to her. Her passion was roused, it was
fierce but cold. But it was fierce, and extreme, and good, their
passion this night. He slept with her fast in his arms. All
night long he held her fast against him. She was passive,
acquiscent. But her sleep was not very deep nor very real.

She woke in the morning to a sound of water dashed on a
courtyard, to sunlight streaming through a lattice. She thought
she was in a foreign country. And Skrebensky was there an
incubus upon her.

She lay still, th