ave won his case,"
said Dion, in a low voice.

"Is that all?" she said, very simply and without any emotion.

"All?"

"Yes. Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn't realize that
my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue? Dion, you don't
know how boyish you still are. You will always be in some ways a boy.
I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened. But what is the
good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt? If I am what you
suspect, of course I shall tell lies. If I am not, what is the good of
my telling you the truth? What is to make you believe it?"

He was silent. She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his
side. What sort of weapon was she? That was the great question for
him. Since his struggle in the forest of _Defetgamm_ he had come to
the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and
surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like
a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy. He was resolved at
last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a
weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.

"I don't want to believe I am only one among many," he said at last.

The sound of his voice gave her the cue to his inmost feeling. She had
been puzzled in the forest, she had been half afraid, seeing that he
had arrived at an acute emotional crisis and not understanding what had
brought him to it. She did not understand that now, but she knew that he
was asking from her more than he had ever asked before. He had been
cast out and now he was knocking hard on her door. He was knocking, but
lingering remnants of the influence of the woman who had colored his
former life hung about him like torn rags, and his hands instinctively
felt for them, pulled at them, to cover his nakedness. Still, while he
knocked, he looked back to the other life. Nevertheless--she knew this
with all there was of woman in her--he wanted from her all that the good
woman had never given to him, was incapable of giving to him or to any
one. He wanted from her, perhaps, powers of the body which would suffice
finally for the killing of those powers of the soul by which he was
now tormented ceaselessly. The sound of his voice demanded from her
something no other man had ever demanded from her, the slaughter in him
of what he had lived by through all his years. Nevertheless he was still
looking back to all the old puritie