andth part worthy of you. Will you not listen to
me seriously? Will you not be so kind?"

A tremor of emotion slightly lifted her hands, and it seemed for a moment
as if she would extend them to him. Then there was a sudden revulsion:
with a more violent shudder, evidently of a painful nature, she threw
herself backward, her face turned pale, and she closed her eyes as if to
shut him from her sight.

"I ought to ask your pardon," she whispered. "I never thought that it
would come to this. I never meant that it should. Oh, I ask your pardon."
Recovering herself with singular quickness, a bright smile dancing along
the constantly changing curves of her lips, like sunbeams leaping from
wavelet to wavelet, she once more leaned cordially toward him, and said in
a gay yet pleading tone, "Let us talk of something else. Come, tell me
about yourself--all about yourself, nothing about me."

"I cannot speak of anything else," he replied, after looking at her long
in silence. "My whole being is full of you: I cannot think of anything
else."

A smile of gratitude sweetly mastered her mouth: then it suddenly turned
to a smile of pity; then it died in a quiver of remorse.

"Oh, we cannot marry," she sighed. "We must not marry, if we could. Let me
tell you something dreadful. People hate each other after they are
married. I know: I have seen it. I knew a girl of seventeen who married a
man ten years older--a man who was Reason itself. Her friends told her,
and she herself believed it, that she was sure of happiness. But after
three years she found that she did not love, that she was not loved, and
that she was miserable. He was too rational: he used to judge her as he
would a column of figures--he had no comprehension for her feelings."

There was a momentary pause, during which she folded her hands and looked
at him, but with an air of not seeing him. In the recollection of this
heart-tragedy of the past and of another she had apparently forgotten the
one which was now pressing upon herself.

"It was incredible how cold and unsympathizing and dull he could be," she
went on. "Once, after she had worked a week in secret to surprise him with
a dressing-gown made by her own hands--labored a week, waited and hoped a
week for one word of praise--he only said, 'It is too short.' Don't you
think it was cruel? It was. I suppose he soon forgot it, but she never
could. A woman cannot forget such slights: they do not seem little blows
to h