oy, exactly like you in miniature. I loved it, of course; I
could not help it, but it is better as it is, better that it should
die. We could not foresee how it would grow up, and so many men, the
majority, are such monsters, such cruel fiends, it is really a crime
to bring one into the world."

I was silent, thinking over that wonderful devotion and courage she
had shewn me. Of all the solutions to the problem of her flight from
me, this had never presented itself to my mind. We are taught both by
tradition and experience how most women cling to their lover at such a
time. Though indifferent, even faithless to him in their beauty and
health, they come to him then for protection, for assistance. For
their name's sake, to save their conventional honour, they will even
accept marriage with one they no longer love, or force themselves on
one they know has no longer love for them.

But how different this one, as always, had been! To preserve inviolate
the spirit of our love, she had gone forward to meet what must to a
sensitive nature like hers have been a time of horror and terror,
absolutely alone, unsupported except by the thought that I was away,
free, unable to share her misery!

With gifts in both hands she had come to me and laid them all in mine.
Then, when I had broken my trust and brought distress upon her, when
she was in need and I could have been the one to give, she had fled
away from love, from consolation, from any return or reparation.
Proud, courageous, independent, untamable, as she had always been, she
was in comparison with other women as a lioness is to a gazelle.

I folded my arms round her tighter at these thoughts, for the lioness
was mine and I owned her.

Perhaps, after all, it was worth while to suffer that agony of
self-reproach I had just now, and was suffering still, to see put in
such shining light before me her courage and her worth.

This was a white night, surely, as the others had been coloured, for
as white is the blending of all the colours into one, so in this night
all the emotions of those previous nights were blended. Passion,
jealousy, triumph, and an agony like death had all swept over me in
these few short hours, and now from them all, blent together and
burning as metals in a smelter, rose up the extreme white vivid flame
of love for her like the white silken tongue of fire, the last degree
of fiercest heat that the smelter can produce.

I bent over her, looking down int