ys it."

What was the something? Did she stand again on the edge of revelation?
Events had gone past the time when he could wait patiently for her
confidence, could approach it through tact. It was the moment not for
snipping but for bold charging. And his blood ran hot.

"This something--won't you tell me what it is? Why are you always so
mysterious with me? Why--when I want to know everything about you?"
After he had said this, he knew that there was no going backward.
Doubts, fears, terrors of conventionalities, awe of his conservative,
blood-proud mother in Paris--all flew to the winds.

Perhaps she caught something of this in his face, for she drew away a
trifle and said:

"I might have told you long ago, but I wasn't sure of your sympathy."

"I want you to be sure of my sympathy in all things."

"Ah, but your mind is between!" That phrase brought a shock to Dr.
Blake. At the only spiritualistic seance he had ever attended, a greasy
affair in a hall bedroom, he had heard that very phrase. A picture of
this woman, so clean and windblown of mind and soul, caught like a
trapped fly in the web of the unclean and corrupt--it was that which
quite whirled him off his feet.

"Between our hearts then, between our hearts!" he cried. "Oh, Annette,
I love you!" His voice came out of him low and distinct, but all the
power in the world vibrated behind it. "I have loved you always. You've
been with me everywhere I went, because I was looking for you. I've
seen a part of you in the best of every woman"--he pulled himself up,
for neither by look nor gesture did she respond--"I've no right to be
saying this--"

"If you have not," she answered, and a delicate blush ran over her
skin, "no other man has!" She said it simply, but with a curious kind
of pride.

He would have taken her hand on this, but the grave, direct gaze of her
sapphirine eyes restrained him. It was not the look of a woman who
gives herself, but rather that of a woman who grieves for the
ungivable.

"Ah," she said, "if anyone's to blame, it is I. I've brought it on
myself! I've been weak--weak!"

"No," he said, "I brought it on--God brought it on--but what does that
matter?

"It's _here_. I can no more fight it than I can fight the sea."

Now her head dropped forward and her hands, with that gracefully
uncertain motion which was like flower-stalks swayed by a breeze, had
covered her face.

"I can't speak if I look at you," she said, "and I must be