ved or hated her. Afterward, when he had gone, her perceptions would
be blunted again and she would suffer, she knew; but now, while she
stood there face to face with him, she could not feel that he bore any
vital part in her existence.

"You must believe whatever your feeling for me dictates," he retorted.
"I shall not stoop to meet a charge of which I am still ignorant--I have
loved you," he added, "more than I have ever loved any man or woman in
my life."

"You have never loved me--you do not love me now," she responded coolly.

She had not meant to speak the words; they held no particular meaning
for her ears; and yet they had no sooner passed her lips than she had a
strange impression that they remained like detached, living things in
the space between them. Why she had spoken as she had done, she could
not tell, nor why she had really cared so little at the instant when she
had uttered her passionate reproach. Then she remembered a wooden figure
she had once seen on the stage--a figure that walked and moved its arms
and uttered sounds which resembled a human voice--and it seemed to her
that she, herself, was this figure and that her gestures and the words
she spoke were the result of the hidden automaton within her.

She saw him pass to the door, look back once, and then leave the room
with his rapid step, and while her eyes followed him, she felt that the
man who had just gone from her with that angry glance was a different
individual from the man whom she still loved and for whom she would
presently suffer an agony of longing. Then as the sound of the hall door
closing sharply fell on her ears, she passed instantly from the
deadening lethargy of her senses into a vivid realisation of the thing
which had just happened--of the meaning of the words which she had
spoken and of the look which he had thrown back at her as he went. A
passion of despair rose in her throat, struggling for release until it
became a physical torture, and she cried out in her loneliness that
nothing mattered--neither truth nor falsehood--so long as she could be
brought again face to face with his actual presence.

But--if she had only known the truth!--Kemper had never desired her so
ardently as in the hour when he told himself that, by his own fault, he
had lost her forever; she had never shown herself so worthy to be won as
when she had looked down upon him from the remoteness of her disdain.
Like many men of flexible morality, he ent