e first. There were others; ever so many others. I'm--that sort."

"I don't believe you."

"You've got to believe me. You can't marry me, and you've got to see
why."

She also paused. Her silences were terrible to him.

"I thought you did see once. It didn't seem possible that you couldn't.
Do you remember the first time I met you?"

He remembered.

"I thought you saw then. And afterward--don't you remember how you
followed me out of the room--another night?"

"Yes."

"I thought you understood, and were too shy to say so. But you didn't.
_Then_--do you remember how I waited for you at the end of the
garden?--and how we sat out on the Cliff? I was trying then--the way I
always try. I thought I'd make you--and you--you wouldn't see it. You
only wanted to help me. You were so innocent and dear. That's what made
me love you."

"Oh," he groaned. "Don't."

But she went on. "And do you remember how you found me--that night--out
on the Cliff?"

She drew back her voice softly.

"I was sure then that you knew, and that when you asked me to come back
with you----"

"Look here, Kitty, I've had enough of it."

"You haven't, for you're fond of me still. You are, aren't you?"

"Oh, my God! how do I know?"

"_I_ know. It's because you haven't taken it in. What do you think of
this? You've known me ten days, and ten days before that I was with
Wilfrid Marston."

[Illustration: "'I want to make you loathe me ... never see me again.'"]

He had taken it in at last. She had made it real to him, clothed it in
flesh and blood.

"If you don't believe me," she said, "ask him. That's what he came to
see me for. He wanted me to go back to him. In fact, I wasn't supposed
to have left him."

He put his hand to his forehead as if he were trying to steady his mind
to face the thing that stunned it.

"And you're telling me all this because----" he said dully.

"Because I want to make you loathe me, so that you can go away and be
glad that you'll never see me again. And if it hurts you too much to
think of me as I am, to think that you cared for me, just say to
yourself that I cared for _you_, and that I couldn't have done it if I'd
been quite bad."

She cried out, "It would have been better for me if I had been. I
shouldn't _feel_ then. It wouldn't hurt me to see little children. I
should have got over that long ago; and I shouldn't have cared for you
or them. I shouldn't have been able to. We get like that. And then--I