d furtive indications, that her horror of me was
deepening day by day. I believe she could hardly bring herself to be in
a room alone with me, especially after nightfall.

One evening, when we were dining, the butler, after placing dessert upon
the table, moved to leave us. She turned white, and, as he reached the
door, half rose, and called him back in a sharp voice.

"Symonds!" she said.

"Yes, ma'am?"

"You are going?"

The fellow looked surprised.

"Can I get you anything, ma'am?"

She glanced at me with an indescribable uneasiness. Then she leaned back
in her chair with an effort, and pressed her lips together.

"No," she said.

As the man went out and shut the door, she looked at me again from
under her eyelids; and finally her eyes travelled from me to a small,
thin-bladed knife, used for cutting oranges, that lay near her plate,
and fixed themselves on it. She put out her hand stealthily, drew it
towards her, and kept her hand over it on the table. I took an orange
from a dish in front of me.

"Margot," I said, "will you pass me that fruit-knife?"

She obviously hesitated.

"Give me that knife," I repeated roughly, stretching out my hand.

She lifted her hand, left the knife upon the table, and at the same
time, springing up, glided softly out of the room and closed the door
behind her.

That evening I spent alone in the smoking-room, and, for the first time,
she did not come to bid me good-night.

I sat smoking my cigar in a tumult of furious despair and love. The
situation was becoming intolerable. It could not be en-dured. I longed
for a crisis, even for a violent one. I could have cried aloud that
night for a veritable tragedy. There were moments when I would almost
have killed the child who mysteriously eluded and defied me. I could
have wreaked a cruel vengeance upon the body for the sin of the mind. I
was terribly, mortally distressed.

After a long and painful self-communion, I resolved to make another wild
effort to set things right before it was too late; and when the clock
chimed the half-hour after ten I went upstairs softly to her bedroom and
turned the handle of the door, meaning to enter, to catch Margot in my
arms, tell her how deep my love for her was, how she injured me by her
base fears, and how she was driving me back from the gentleness she had
given me to the cruelty, to the brutality, of my first nature.

The door resisted me: it was locked. I paused a moment, and the