"What is that to me?" she says, with almost insolent coldness. "It was not I who loved you, but a child who knew no better, and whose heart was so bleeding from the tortures of another man that the first hand which soothed it could take it as one takes a wounded bird! But when my eyes opened to your drift and your desires, when I saw that you were no better than other men, that you tried to tempt me to the lowest forms of intrigue under cover of your friendship with my husband, then, child though I was, I saw you as you were, and I hid myself from you! You thought that Sabaroff exiled me from his jealousy of you to the northern estates; but it was not so. I entreated him to let me leave Petersburg, and he had grown tired of torturing me and let me go." "You blame me for being merely human. I loved you not better but not worse than men do love." "I blame you for having been insincere, treacherous, dishonest. You approached me under cover of the most delicate and forbearing sympathy and reverence, and you only wore those masks to cover the vulgar designs of a most commonplace Lothario. Of course, now I know that one must not play with fire unless one is willing to be burned. I did not know it then. I was a stupid, unhappy, trembling child, full of poetic fancies, and alone in a dissolute crowd. When you could not make me what you wished to make me, I seemed very tame and useless to you. You turned to more facile women, no doubt, and you left Russia." "I left Russia under orders; and I wrote to you. I wrote to you repeatedly. You never answered." "No; I had no wish to answer you. I had seen you as you were, and the veil had fallen from my eyes. I burnt your letters as they came to me. But after the death of Prince Sabaroff you were careful to write no more." Gervase colors hotly; there is an accent in the words which makes them strike him like whips. "If you had written to me after that," she continues, "perhaps I should have answered you; perhaps not: I cannot tell. When you knew that I was set free you were silent; you stayed away, I know not where. I never saw you again; I never heard from you again. Now I thank you for your neglect and oblivion, but at the time I confess that it made me suffer. I was very young still, and romantic. For a while I expected every month which melted the snow would bring you back. So much I admit, though it will flatter you." It does not flatter him as she says it; rather it wounds him. He has a hateful sense of his own impotency to stir her one hand's breadth, to breathe one spark of warmth into those ashes gone cold forever.