uickly, almost imperiously.

"Yes--I mean _you_," replied he.

"You mean you think I'm hindering him?"

When Drumley's voice finally came, it was funereally solemn.
"You are dragging him down. You are killing his ambition."

"You don't understand," she protested with painful expression.
"If you did, you wouldn't say that."

"You mean because he is not true to you?"

"Isn't he?" said she, loyally trying to pretend surprise. "If
that's so, you've no right to tell me--you, his friend. If it
isn't, you----"

"In either case I'd be beneath contempt--unless I knew that you
knew already. Oh, I've known a long time that you knew--ever
since the night you looked away when he absent-mindedly pulled a
woman's veil and gloves out of his pocket. I've watched you
since then, and I know."

"You are a very dear friend, Mr. Drumley," said she. "But you
must not talk of him to me."

"I must," he replied. And he hastened to make the self-fooled
hypocrite's familiar move to the safety of duty's skirts. "It
would be a crime to keep silent."

She rose. "I can't listen. It may be your duty to speak. It's my
duty to refuse to hear."

"He is overwhelmed with debt. He is about to lose his position.
It is all because he is degraded--because he feels he is
entangled in an intrigue with a woman he is ashamed to love--a
woman he has struggled in vain to put out of his heart."

Susan, suddenly weak, had seated herself again. From his first
words she had been prey to an internal struggle--her heart
fighting against understanding things about her relations with
Rod, about his feeling toward her, which she had long been
contriving to hide from herself. When Drumley began she knew
that the end of self-deception was at hand--if she let him
speak. But the instant he had spoken, the struggle ended. If he
had tried to stop she would have compelled him to go on.

"That woman is you," he continued in the same solemn measured
way. "Rod will not marry you. He cannot leave you. And you are
dragging him down. You are young. You don't know that passionate
love is a man's worst enemy. It satisfies his ambition--why
struggle when one already has attained the climax of desire? It
saps his strength, takes from him the energy without which
achievement is impossible. Passion dies poisoned of its own
sweets. But passionate love kills--at least, it kills the man. If
you did not love him, I'd not be talking to you now. But you d