wish me to vanish again and for ever. Wretch
that I am, I have longed for you unspeakably more than once since I ran
away from you. You didn't care, of course?"

"I did. I did, indeed. Why did you leave me, Sidney?"

"Lest a worse thing might befall. Come, don't let us waste in
explanations the few minutes we have left. Give me a kiss."

"Then you are going to leave me again. Oh, Sidney--"

"Never mind to-morrow, Hetty. Be like the sun and the meadow, which are
not in the least concerned about the coming winter. Why do you stare
at that cursed canal, blindly dragging its load of filth from place to
place until it pitches it into the sea--just as a crowded street pitches
its load into the cemetery? Stare at ME, and give me a kiss."

She gave him several, and said coaxingly, with her arm still upon his
shoulder: "You only talk that way to frighten me, Sidney; I know you
do."

"You are the bright sun of my senses," he said, embracing her. "I feel
my heart and brain wither in your smile, and I fling them to you for
your prey with exultation. How happy I am to have a wife who does not
despise me for doing so--who rather loves me the more!"

"Don't be silly," said Henrietta, smiling vacantly. Then, stung by a
half intuition of his meaning, she repulsed him and said angrily, "YOU
despise ME."

"Not more than I despise myself. Indeed, not so much; for many emotions
that seem base from within seem lovable from without."

"You intend to leave me again. I feel it. I know it."

"You think you know it because you feel it. Not a bad reason, either."

"Then you ARE going to leave me?"

"Do you not feel it and know it? Yes, my cherished Hetty, I assuredly
am."

She broke into wild exclamations of grief, and he drew her head down and
kissed her with a tender action which she could not resist, and a wry
face which she did not see.

"My poor Hetty, you don't understand me."

"I only understand that you hate me, and want to go away from me."

"That would be easy to understand. But the strangeness is that I LOVE
you and want to go away from you. Not for ever. Only for a time."

"But I don't want you to go away. I won't let you go away," she said,
a trace of fierceness mingling with her entreaty. "Why do you want to
leave me if you love me?"

"How do I know? I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of myself
than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry myself into the
next county, as some one challenged a