terview with her father, Denham made no comment, but said:

"Anyhow, there's no reason why we shouldn't see each other."

"Or stay together. It's only marriage that's out of the question,"
Katharine replied.

"But if I find myself coming to want you more and more?"

"If our lapses come more and more often?"

He sighed impatiently, and said nothing for a moment.

"But at least," he renewed, "we've established the fact that my lapses
are still in some odd way connected with you; yours have nothing to do
with me. Katharine," he added, his assumption of reason broken up by
his agitation, "I assure you that we are in love--what other people
call love. Remember that night. We had no doubts whatever then. We were
absolutely happy for half an hour. You had no lapse until the day after;
I had no lapse until yesterday morning. We've been happy at intervals
all day until I--went off my head, and you, quite naturally, were
bored."

"Ah," she exclaimed, as if the subject chafed her, "I can't make you
understand. It's not boredom--I'm never bored. Reality--reality," she
ejaculated, tapping her finger upon the table as if to emphasize and
perhaps explain her isolated utterance of this word. "I cease to be real
to you. It's the faces in a storm again--the vision in a hurricane. We
come together for a moment and we part. It's my fault, too. I'm as bad
as you are--worse, perhaps."

They were trying to explain, not for the first time, as their weary
gestures and frequent interruptions showed, what in their common
language they had christened their "lapses"; a constant source of
distress to them, in the past few days, and the immediate reason why
Ralph was on his way to leave the house when Katharine, listening
anxiously, heard him and prevented him. What was the cause of these
lapses? Either because Katharine looked more beautiful, or more strange,
because she wore something different, or said something unexpected,
Ralph's sense of her romance welled up and overcame him either into
silence or into inarticulate expressions, which Katharine, with
unintentional but invariable perversity, interrupted or contradicted
with some severity or assertion of prosaic fact. Then the vision
disappeared, and Ralph expressed vehemently in his turn the conviction
that he only loved her shadow and cared nothing for her reality. If the
lapse was on her side it took the form of gradual detachment until she
became completely absorbed in her own though