ike a tired man whose legs are
reluctant to resume their load. She stood quite still, regarding me now
with alarmed and wondering eyes.

"It's nothing," I stammered. "Indeed it's nothing; only I hadn't thought
of it."

Scarcely knowing what I did, I began to move towards the door. An
unreasoned instinct impelled me to get away from her. Yet my gaze was
drawn to her face; I saw her lips pouting and her cheek flushed, the
brightness of her eyes grew clouded. She loved me enough to be hurt by
me, if no more. A pity seized me; turning, I fell on my knee, and,
seizing the hand whose touch I had refused, I kissed it.

"Ah, you kiss my hand now!" she cried, breaking into smiles again.

"I kiss Cydaria's hand," said I. "For in truth I'm sorry for my
Cydaria."

"She was no other than I am," she whispered, and now with a touch of
shame; for she saw that I felt shame for her.

"Not what is hurts us, but what we know," said I. "Good-bye, Cydaria,"
and again I kissed her hand. She drew it away from me and tossed her
head, crying angrily:

"I wish I hadn't told you."

"In God's name don't wish that," said I, and drew her gaze on me again
in surprise. I moved on my way, the only way my feet could tread. But
she darted after me, and laid her hand on my arm. I looked at her in
amazed questioning.

"You'll come again, Simon, when--?" The smile would not be denied though
it came timidly, afraid for its welcome and distrustful of its right.
"When you're better, Simon?"

I longed--with all my heart I longed--to be kind to her. How could the
thing be to her what it was to me? She could not understand why I was
aghast; extravagant despair, all in the style of a vanquished rival,
would have been easy for her to meet, to ridicule, to comfort. I knew
all this, but I could not find the means to affect it or to cover my own
distress.

"You'll come again then?" she insisted pleadingly.

"No," said I, bluntly, and cruelly with unwilling cruelty.

At that a sudden gust of passion seized her and she turned on me,
denouncing me fiercely, in terms she took no care to measure, for a
prudish virtue that for good or evil was not mine, and for a narrowness
of which my reason was not guilty. I stood defenceless in the storm,
crying at the end no more than, "I don't think thus of you."

"You treat me as though you thought thus," she cried. Yet her manner
softened and she came across to me, seeming now as if she might fall to
weeping. But at