t up.

I knew that my tears, though I was trying to keep them back, were
trickling down my cheeks. I saw that his face was all broken up as it
had been the night before.

There was a moment of silence in which I was conscious of nothing but
the fierce beating of my pulse, and then he raised my hand to his lips,
dropped it gently and walked over to the door.

But after he had opened it he turned and looked at me. I looked at him,
longing, craving, hungering for his love as for a flame at which my
heart could warm itself.

Then came a blinding moment. It seemed as if in an instant he lost all
control of himself, and his love came rushing upon him like a mighty
surging river.

Flinging the door back he returned to me with long strides, and
snatching me up in his great arms, he lifted me off my feet, clasped me
tightly to him, kissed me passionately on the mouth and cried in a
quivering, husky voice:

"You are my wife. I am your real husband. I am not leaving you because
you are married to this brute, but for the sake of your soul. We love
each other. We shall continue to love each other. No matter where you
are, or what they do with you, you are mine and always will be."

My blood was boiling. The world was reeling round me. There was a
roaring in my brain. All my spiritual impulses had gone. I was a woman,
and it was the same to me as if the primordial man had taken possession
of me by sheer force. Yet I was not afraid of that. I rejoiced in it. I
wanted to give myself up to it.

But the next moment Martin had dropped me, and fled from the room,
clashing the door behind him.

I felt as if a part of myself had been torn from my breast and had gone
out with him.

The room seemed to become dark.

SIXTY-NINTH CHAPTER

For a moment I stood where Martin had left me, throbbing through and
through like an open wound, telling myself that he had gone, that I
should never see him again, and that I had driven him away from me.

Those passionate kisses had deprived me of the power of consecutive
thought. I could only feel. And the one thing I felt above everything
else was that the remedy I had proposed to myself for my unhappy
situation--renunciation--was impossible, because Martin was a part of my
own being and without him I could not live.

"Martin! Martin! My love! My love!" cried the voice of my heart.

In fear lest I had spoken the words aloud, and in terror of what I might
do under the power of them,