luminous fact of her existence.
But in the sudden darkness of her going he would be left weak and
helpless, as though despoiled violently of all that was himself. He who
had lived all his life with no preoccupation but that of his own career,
contemptuously indifferent to all feminine influence, full of scorn
for men that would submit to it, if ever so little; he, so strong,
so superior even in his errors, realized at last that his very
individuality was snatched from within himself by the hand of a woman.
Where was the assurance and pride of his cleverness; the belief in
success, the anger of failure, the wish to retrieve his fortune, the
certitude of his ability to accomplish it yet? Gone. All gone. All that
had been a man within him was gone, and there remained only the trouble
of his heart--that heart which had become a contemptible thing; which
could be fluttered by a look or a smile, tormented by a word, soothed by
a promise.

When the longed-for day came at last, when she sank on the grass by his
side and with a quick gesture took his hand in hers, he sat up suddenly
with the movement and look of a man awakened by the crash of his own
falling house. All his blood, all his sensation, all his life seemed to
rush into that hand leaving him without strength, in a cold shiver, in
the sudden clamminess and collapse as of a deadly gun-shot wound.
He flung her hand away brutally, like something burning, and sat
motionless, his head fallen forward, staring on the ground and catching
his breath in painful gasps. His impulse of fear and apparent horror
did not dismay her in the least. Her face was grave and her eyes looked
seriously at him. Her fingers touched the hair of his temple, ran in
a light caress down his cheek, twisted gently the end of his long
moustache: and while he sat in the tremor of that contact she ran off
with startling fleetness and disappeared in a peal of clear laughter,
in the stir of grass, in the nod of young twigs growing over the path;
leaving behind only a vanishing trail of motion and sound.

He scrambled to his feet slowly and painfully, like a man with a burden
on his shoulders, and walked towards the riverside. He hugged to his
breast the recollection of his fear and of his delight, but told
himself seriously over and over again that this must be the end of that
adventure. After shoving off his canoe into the stream he lifted his
eyes to the bank and gazed at it long and steadily, as if tak