'Are you regretting Ursula?' he asked.

'No, not at all,' she said. Then, in a slow mood, she asked:

'How much do you love me?'

He stiffened himself further against her.

'How much do you think I do?' he asked.

'I don't know,' she replied.

'But what is your opinion?' he asked.

There was a pause. At length, in the darkness, came her voice, hard and
indifferent:

'Very little indeed,' she said coldly, almost flippant.

His heart went icy at the sound of her voice.

'Why don't I love you?' he asked, as if admitting the truth of her
accusation, yet hating her for it.

'I don't know why you don't--I've been good to you. You were in a
FEARFUL state when you came to me.'

Her heart was beating to suffocate her, yet she was strong and
unrelenting.

'When was I in a fearful state?' he asked.

'When you first came to me. I HAD to take pity on you. But it was never
love.'

It was that statement 'It was never love,' which sounded in his ears
with madness.

'Why must you repeat it so often, that there is no love?' he said in a
voice strangled with rage.

'Well you don't THINK you love, do you?' she asked.

He was silent with cold passion of anger.

'You don't think you CAN love me, do you?' she repeated almost with a
sneer.

'No,' he said.

'You know you never HAVE loved me, don't you?'

'I don't know what you mean by the word 'love,' he replied.

'Yes, you do. You know all right that you have never loved me. Have
you, do you think?'

'No,' he said, prompted by some barren spirit of truthfulness and
obstinacy.

'And you never WILL love me,' she said finally, 'will you?'

There was a diabolic coldness in her, too much to bear.

'No,' he said.

'Then,' she replied, 'what have you against me!'

He was silent in cold, frightened rage and despair. 'If only I could
kill her,' his heart was whispering repeatedly. 'If only I could kill
her--I should be free.'

It seemed to him that death was the only severing of this Gordian knot.

'Why do you torture me?' he said.

She flung her arms round his neck.

'Ah, I don't want to torture you,' she said pityingly, as if she were
comforting a child. The impertinence made his veins go cold, he was
insensible. She held her arms round his neck, in a triumph of pity. And
her pity for him was as cold as stone, its deepest motive was hate of
him, and fear of his power over her, which she must always counterfoil.

'Say you love me,' she pleaded. 'Say y