. On one of the floors of the house where Elise Romey
was picked up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an
important Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made
friends with him there. He walked home with me this afternoon, saw the
announcement of Madame Desforets coming, and poured out the story. He
and his wife nursed the unfortunate girl with devotion. She lived just
a week, and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life heard
anything so pitiful as his description of her delirium, her terror, her
appeals, her shivering misery of cold.'

There was a pause.

'She is not a woman,' he said presently, between his teeth. 'She is a
wild beast.'

Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the flame
which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round.

'I have told you a shocking story,' he said hurriedly, 'Perhaps I ought
not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking so lightly, so gayly,
it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable that that woman should ever
sit here in this room--talk to you--call you by your name--laugh with
you--touch your hand! Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so
far--you _shall_ not do it!'

He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a passionate sense of
physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure fair
youth and something malodorous and corrupt. And there was beside a wild
unique excitement in claiming for once to stay--to control her.

Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw the tears in
her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl's awful story.
But through the tears something gleamed--a kind of exultation--the
exultation which the magician feels when he has called spirits from the
vasty deep and after long doubt and difficult invocation they rise at
last before his eyes.

'I will never see her again'--she said in a low wavering voice, but
she too was hardly conscious of her own words. Their looks were on
each other; the ruddy capricious light touched her glowing cheeks,
her straight-lined grace, her white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of
another's misery into which they had both been looking, there had sprung
up, by the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication
of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from
them like a golden mist. 'Be always thus!' her parted lips, her liquid
eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed