you extremely, I think you are an
incomparable actress."

"You see!" She offered a despairing gesture to the stars. "It is not
true what I say? I lay bare my heart to him, and he tells me that I
act!"

"But my dear girl! surely you do not expect me to think otherwise?"

"I was a fool to expect anything from you," she returned bitterly--"you
know too much about me. I cannot find it in my heart to blame you,
since I am what I am, what the life you saved me to so long ago has
made me. Why should you believe in me? Why should you credit the
sincerity of this confession, which costs me so much humiliation? That
would be too good for me, too much to ask of life!"

"I think you cannot fairly complain of life, Liane. What have you asked
of it that you have failed to get? Success, money, power,
adulation----"

"Never love."

"The world would find it difficult to believe that."

"Ah, love of a sort, yes: the love that is the desire to possess and
that possession satisfies."

"Have you asked for any other sort?"

"I ask it now. I know what the love is that longs to give, to give and
give again, asking no return but kindness, understanding, even
toleration merely. It is such love as this I bear you, Michael. But you
do not believe...."

Divided between annoyance and distaste, he was silent. And all at once
she threw herself half across the joined arms of their chairs, catching
his shoulders with her hands, so that her half-clothed body rested on
his bosom, and its scented warmth assailed his senses with the
seduction whose power she knew so well.

"Ah, Michael, my Michael!" she cried--"if you but knew, if only you
could believe! It is so real to me, so true, so overwhelming, the
greatest thing of all! How can it be otherwise to you?... No: do not
think I complain, do not think I blame you or have room in my heart for
any resentment. But, oh my dear! were I only able to make you
understand, think what life could be to us, to you and me. What could
it withhold that we desired? You with your wit, your strength, your
skill, your poise--I with my great love to inspire and sustain
you--what a pair we should make! what happiness would be ours! Think,
Michael--think!"

"I have thought, Liane," he returned in accents as kind as the hands
that held her. "I have thought well..."

"Yes?" She lifted her face so near that their breaths mingled, and he
was conscious of the allure of tremulous and parted lips. "You have
thought