longs to us!" She was roused to protest by the under-meaning
in his words. "It's as much a part of ourselves as our thoughts are--or
our hands."

"One is glad to forget. You would be, Louise? You wouldn't care if your
past were gone? Say you wouldn't."

But she only threw him a dark side-glance. As, however, he would not
rest content, she flung out her hands with an impatient gesture. "How
CAN you torment yourself so! If you insist on knowing, well, then, I
wouldn't part with an hour of what's gone--not an hour! And you know
it."

She caught at a few vivid leaves that had remained hanging on a bare
branch, and carried them with her.

He took one she held out to him, looked at it without seeing it, and
threw it away. "Tell me, just this once, something about your life
before I knew you. Were you very happy?--or were you unhappy? Do you
know, I once heard you say you had never known a moment's
happiness?--yes, one summer night long ago, over in the NONNE. How I
hoped then it was true! But I don't know. You've never told me
anything--of all there must be to tell."

"What you may have chanced to hear, by eavesdropping, doesn't concern
me now," Louise answered coldly. And then she shut her lips, and would
say no more. She was wiser than she had been a week ago: she refused to
hand her past over to him in order that he might smirch it with his
thoughts.

But she could not understand him--understand the motives that made him
want to unearth the past. If this were jealousy, it was a kind she did
not know--a bloodless, bodiless kind, of which she had had no
experience.

But it was not jealousy; it was only a craving for certainty in any
guise, and the more surely Maurice felt that he would never gain it,
the more tenaciously he strove. For certainty, that feeling of utter
reliance in the loved one, which sets the heart at rest and leaves the
mind free for the affairs of life, was what Louise had never given him;
he had always been obliged to fall back on supposition with regard to
her, equally at the height of their passion, and in that first and
stretch of time, when it was forbidden him to touch her hand. The real
truth, the last-reaching truth about her, it would not be his to know.
Soul would never be absorbed in soul; not the most passionate embraces
could bridge the gulf; to their last kiss, they would remain separate
beings, lonely and alone.

As this went on, he came to hate the vapidities of the concerto in G