t intrude without
perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand
opera-singer had strained the acoustics of a private music-room.

Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them,
but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of
reticence and ambiguity had fallen.

His first words were characteristic. "She _does_ despise me, then?" he
exclaimed.

"She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the
heart."

He was excessively pale. "Please tell me exactly what she said of me."

"She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while
she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened
to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed
an unwillingness to be taken with reservations--she thinks you would
have loved her better if you had loved some one else first. The point
of view is original--she insists on a man with a past!"

"Oh, a past--if she's serious--I could rake up a past!" he said with a
laugh.

"So I suggested: but she has her eyes on his particular portion of it.
She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had
done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling
her."

Thursdale drew a difficult breath. "I never supposed--your revenge is
complete," he said slowly.

He heard a little gasp in her throat. "My revenge? When I sent for you
to warn you--to save you from being surprised as _I_ was surprised?"

"You're very good--but it's rather late to talk of saving me." He held
out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

"How you must care!--for I never saw you so dull," was her answer.
"Don't you see that it's not too late for me to help you?" And as he
continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: "Take the rest--in
imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I
lied to her--she's too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a
sense, I sha'n't have been wasted."

His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look
back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to
need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept
them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this
contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but
something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He
went