, to touch you, to look into your eyes; why I should love,
next to one thing of all earth, to take you in my arms and smother
you--kill you with kisses--your hair, your eyes, your mouth?"

She hid her face, crimson.

"Did no one tell you, ever tell you--how much you look like your
cousin"--he stopped--he could not say the word, but she guessed.
White with shame, she sprang up from him, startled, hurt. Her heart
tightened into a painful thing which pricked her.

"Then--then--it is not I--but my Cousin Alice--oh--I--yes--I did
hear--I should have known"--it came from her slowly and with a
quivering tremor.

He seized her hands and drew her back down by him on the sofa.

"When I started into this with you I was dead--dead. My soul was
withered within me. All women were my playthings--all but one. She
was my Queen--my wife that was to be. I was dead, my God--how dead I
was! I now see with a clearness that is killing me; a clearness as of
one waking from sleep and feeling, in the first wave of conscience,
that inconceivable tenderness which hurts so--hurts because it is
tender and before the old hard consciousness of material things come
again to toughen. How dead I was, you may know when I say that all
this web now around you--from your entrance into the mill till
now--here to-night--in my power--body and soul--that it was all to
gratify this dead sea fruit of my soul, this thing in me I cannot
understand, making me conquer women all my life for--oh, as a lion
would, to kill, though not hungry, and then lie by them, dying, and
watch them,--dead! Then this same God--if any there be--He who you
say put more on you than you could bear--He struck me, as,
well--no--He did not strike--but ground me, ground me into dust--took
her out of my life and then laid my soul before me so naked that the
very sunlight scorches it. What was it the old preacher said--that
'touch of God' business? 'Touch--'" he laughed, "not touch, but blow,
I say--a blow that ground me into star-dust and flung me into space,
my heart a burning comet and my soul the tail of it, dissolving
before my very eyes. What then can I, a lion, dying, care for the doe
that crosses my path? The beautiful doe, beautiful even as you are.
Do you understand me, child?"

She scarcely knew what she did. She remembered only the terrible
empty room. The owl uncannily turning its head here and there and
staring at her with its eyes, yellow in the firelight.

She dropped on