it to me--at once!"

He groped on the dusty floor; the veins in his forehead hammered. She
had moved to a distance, and now stood busy with the gloves; she would
not look at him.

In the uneasy silence that ensued, Herries opened the door: a moment
later, they went out together. Maurice remained standing until he saw
them appear below. Then he dropped back into his seat, and covered his
face with his hands.

He did not regret what he had done; he did not care in the least,
whether he had made her angry with him or not. On the contrary, the
feeling he experienced was akin to relief: disapproval and
mortification, jealousy and powerlessness--all the varying emotions of
the evening--had found vent and alleviation in the few hastily snatched
kisses. He no longer felt injured by her treatment of him: that hardly
seemed to concern him now. His sensations, at this minute, resolved
themselves into the words: "She is mine, she is mine!" which went round
and round in his brain. And then, in a sudden burst of clearness, he
understood what it meant for him to say this. It meant that the farce
of friendship, at which he had played, was at an end; it meant that he
loved her--not as hitherto, with a touch of elegiac resignation--but
with a violence that made him afraid. If seemed incredible to him now
that he had spent two months in close fellowship with her: it was
ludicrous, inhuman. For he now saw, that his ultimate desire had been
neither to help her nor to restore her to life--that was a comedy he
had acted for the benefit of the traditions in his blood. Brutally, at
this moment, he acknowledged that he had only wished to hear her voice
and to touch her hand: to make for himself so indispensable a place
among the necessities of her life that no one could oust him from
it.--Mine--mine! Instinct alone spoke in him to-night--that same blunt
instinct which had reared its head the first time he saw her, but
which, until now, he had kept under, like a medieval ascetic. No reason
came to his aid; he neither looked into the future nor did he consider
the past: he only swore to himself in a kind of stubborn wrath that she
was his, and that no earthly power should take her from him.

One by one the slow-dragging hours wore away. The dancers' ranks were
thinned; but those who remained, gyrated as insensately as ever. There
was an air of greater freedom over the ball-room. The chaperons who,
earlier in the evening, had sat patiently on t