F THE FEAR IN LOVE

When Laura reached the sidewalk she was seized by one of those reactions
of feeling which are possible only in periods of unnatural and
overstrained excitement.

"I would rather you didn't come with me now," she said, "I've promised
Gerty to go to her this afternoon, and I'd honestly rather go alone."

"But I've seen nothing of you at all," he urged, "put Gerty aside--she
won't mind. If she does, tell her I made you do it."

She shook her head, shrinking slightly away from him in the street. "It
isn't that, but I want to be alone--to think. Come this evening and I'll
be quite myself again. Only just now I--I can't talk."

In the end he had yielded, overborne by so unusual a spirit of
opposition; and with a reproachful good-bye he had returned to his
rooms, while she went slowly up the street in the pale autumn sunshine.

The impulse in which she had gone to him had utterly died down; and she
asked herself, with a curiosity that was almost indifferent, why, since
the reconciliation she had longed for was now complete, she should feel
only melancholy where she had expected to find happiness? Kemper had
never been more impassioned, had never shown himself to be more
thoroughly the lover--yet in some way she admitted, it had all been
different from the deeper reunion she had hoped for; there had come to
her even while she lay in his arms that strange, though familiar sense
of unreality in her own emotion; and beneath the touch of his hands she
had felt herself to be separated from him by the space of a whole inner
world. Though she appeared to have got everything, she realised, with a
pang of resentment directed against herself, that she had wanted a great
deal more than he had had the power to bestow. Could it be that the
thing she had missed was that finer sympathy of spirit without which all
human passion is but the withered husk where the flower has never
bloomed?

"Is it true that I must be forever content with the mere gesture of
love?" she thought. "Is it true that I shall never reach his soul, which
is surely there if I could but find it? Has it eluded me, after all,
only because I did not know the way?"

This longing for the immortal soul of love seized her like an
unquenchable thirst, until it seemed to her that all outward forms of
expression--all embraces all words--were but dead earthly things until
the breath of the spirit had entered in to raise them from mere trivial
accidents