ling.

"If you _do_ care, Jim, why do you never tell me so?" she demanded of
him, in gentle reproof. He then noticed, for the first time, the
hungry and unsatisfied look that brooded over her face. He confessed
to himself unhappily that something about him was altered.

"This cursed business knocks that sort of thing out of you," he
expiated, discomforted at the thought that a feeling so long
disregarded could grip him so keenly. And all the while he was torn by
the misery of two contending impressions; one, the dim, subliminal
foreboding that she was ordained for worthier and cleaner hands than
his, the other, that this upheaval of the emotions still had the power
to shake and bewilder and leave him so wordlessly unhappy. It was the
ever-recurring incongruity, the repeated syncretism, which made him
vaguely afraid of himself and of the future. Then, as he looked down
into her face once more, and studied the shadowy violet eyes, and the
low brow, and the short-lipped mobile mouth so laden with impulse, and
the soft line of the chin and throat so eloquent of weakness and
yielding, a second and stronger wave of feeling surged through him.

"I love you, Frank; I tell you I do love you!" he cried, with a voice
that did not seem his own. And as she lay back in his arms, weak and
surrendering, with the heavy lashes closed over the shadowy eyes, he
stooped and kissed her on her red, melancholy mouth.

Yet as he did so the act seemed to take on the touch of something
solemn and valedictory, though he fought back the impression with his
still reiterated cry of "I love you!"

"Then why are you unkind to me?" she asked, more calmly now.

"Oh, can't you see I want you--all of you?" he cried.

"Then why do you leave me where so much must be given to other things,
to hateful things?" she asked, with her mild and melancholy eyes still
on his face.

"God knows, I've wanted you out of it, often enough!" he avowed,
desolately. And she made no effort to alleviate his suffering.

"Then why not take me out of it, and keep me out of it?" she demanded,
with a cold directness that brought him wheeling about on her.

He suddenly caught her by the shoulders, and held her away from him, at
arms' length. She thought, at first, that it was a gesture of
repudiation; but she soon saw her mistake. "I swear to God," he was
saying to her, with a grim tremor of determination in his voice as he
spoke, "I swear to God, once we are out o