nto the light.

Fear stabbed Corinna's heart like a knife. "But she still loves you!"
she cried sharply.

He flinched from the sharpness of her tone. "I am sorry," he said again;
but the words glided, with a perfunctory grace, on the surface of
emotion. Suppose that what he said was true, she told herself; suppose
that it was really "over"; suppose that she also recognized only the
egoist's view of duty--of the paramount duty to one's own inclinations;
suppose--"Oh, am I so different from him?" she thought, "why cannot I
also mistake the urging of desire for the command of conscience--or at
least call it that in my mind?" For a minute she struggled desperately
with the temptation; and in that minute it seemed to her that the face
of Alice Rokeby, with its look of wistful expectancy, of hungry
yearning, drifted past her in the twilight.

"But is it obliged to be over?" she asked aloud. "I could never care as
she does. I have always been like that, and I can't change. I have
always been able to feel just so much and no more--to give just so much
and no more."

He looked at her attentively, a little troubled, she could see, but not
deeply hurt, not hurt enough to break down the wall which protected the
secret--or was it the emptiness?--of his nature.

"Has the knowledge of my--my old friendship for Mrs. Rokeby come between
us?" he asked slowly and earnestly.

While he spoke it seemed to her that all that had been obscure in her
view of him rolled away like the mist in the garden, leaving the
structure of his being bare and stark to her critical gaze. Nothing
confused her now; nothing perplexed her in her knowledge of him. The old
sense of incompleteness, of inadequacy, returned; but she understood the
cause of it now; she saw with perfect clearness the defect from which it
had arisen. He had missed the best because, with every virtue of the
mind, he lacked the single one of the heart. Possessing every grace of
character except humanity, he had failed in life because this one gift
was absent.

"All my life," she said brokenly, "I have tried to find something that I
could believe in--that I could keep faith with to the end. But what can
one build a world on except human relations--except relations between
men and women?"

"You mean," he responded gravely, "that you think I have not kept faith
with Mrs. Rokeby?"

"Oh, can't you see? If you would only try, you must surely see!" she
pleaded, with outstretched hands.