stood over her:--"What's the matter?"

"Everything. You don't love me--I was a fool to believe you did."

"Don't love you!" he repeated. "My God, what's the trouble now? What have
I done?"

"Oh, it's nothing you've done, it's what you haven't done, it's what you
can't do. You don't really care for me--all you care for is this mill
--when anything happens here you don't know I'm alive."

He stared at her, and then an expression of comprehension, of intense
desire grew in his eyes; and his laugh, as he flung his cigar out of the
open window and bent down to seize her, was almost brutal. She fought
him, she tried to hurt him, and suddenly, convulsively pressed herself to
him.

"You little tigress!" he said, as he held her. "You were jealous--were
you--jealous of the mill?" And he laughed again. "I'd like to see you
with something really to be jealous about. So you love me like that, do
you?"

She could feel his heart beating against her.

"I won't be neglected," she told him tensely. "I want all of you--if I
can't have all of you, I don't want any. Do you understand?"

"Do I understand? Well, I guess I do."

"You didn't yesterday," she reproached him, somewhat dazed by the
swiftness of her submission, and feeling still the traces of a lingering
resentment. She had not intended to surrender. "You forgot all about me,
you didn't know I was here, much less that I was hurt. Oh, I was hurt!
And you--I can tell at once when anything's wrong with you--I know
without your saying it."

He was amazed, he might indeed have been troubled and even alarmed by
this passion he had aroused had his own passion not been at the flood.
And as he wiped away her tears with his handkerchief he could scarcely
believe his senses that this was the woman whose resistance had demanded
all his force to overcome. Indeed, although he recognized the symptoms
she betrayed as feminine, as having been registered--though feebly
compared to this! by incidents in his past, precisely his difficulty
seemed to be in identifying this complex and galvanic being as a woman,
not as something almost fearful in her significance, outside the bounds
of experience....

Presently she ceased to tremble, and he drew her to the window. The day
was as mild as autumn, the winter sun like honey in its mellowness; a
soft haze blurred the outline of the upper bridge.

"Only two more days until Sunday," he whispered, caressingly,
exultantly....

CHAPTER XII