"Absurd!" he cried. "You are talking nonsense, and you know it. Did you not intend me to understand that I should find you alone? Did your note, your summons (I tore it up, but you remember the words as well as I do), mean anything else? Do you not know this is all folly? There is no need to play with _me_. I am a sure prize or victim, which you please; you know that well enough, and I must know which you _do_ please, for this is, as I said before, a crisis for me. Which is it?" he said, and he held her hands more tightly, and looked at her with a pale face. "Which is it? Mere coquetry--a dangerous game with a man like me I warn you--a game you won't find it possible to play; or--or the deep, deep love of a lifetime--the devotion which will never swerve or falter--the passion which will blot out from your knowledge or your fears everything beyond itself." Weak, imaginative, without principle, easily ruled by strength, though a despot to weakness, the woman he addressed listened to him like one in a dream. Not until afterwards did a sense of being tricked and trapped come to her. Had her demeanour towards Routh really implied all this! Had she yielded to the rapacity for admiration, to the thirst for conquest, which had always dominated in her nature, once too often, and far too completely? This was precisely what she had done, and she had fallen into the hands of a stronger being than herself. In a blind, vague, groping kind of way she felt this, and felt that she could not help or deliver herself, and felt it with something like fear, even while her imagination and her vanity were intoxicated by the mingling of defiance and pleading in his words, in his tones, and in his looks. "You and I," he went on, "would say to others, would say to each other in some of our moods, or would have said when first we met, that no such thing as this all-sufficing love exists, but each of us knows well that it does, and may and _shall_ be ours! This is what _I_ mean. Again I ask you, what is _your_ meaning in all this?" "I don't know," she replied, releasing her hands, and rising. He allowed her to pass him, and to walk to the fireplace. She stood there, her radiant figure glittering in the lustre of the fire and the wax-lights. She stood there, her head bent, her hands before her, the fingers interlaced. After a minute, Routh followed her, and stood before her. "Then you will not answer me--you will not tell me what your meaning was in sending for me to-night?" There was tenderness in his tone now, and the slight inflection of a sense of injury which rarely fails with a woman. "Yes," she said, looking up full at him, "I will tell you. I wanted to let you know that I think of going away." "Going away!" cried Routh, in unbounded amazement--"Going away! What do you mean?"