They look at each other in a sort of terror, with a renewal and immense increase of that fear of their own and each others’ possibilities of frailty, which, looked back upon now, is seen to have been so inadequately weak and so abundantly justified. Since there is no longer any barrier of innocence between them, what is there to hinder them from a repetition--a hundred repetitions--of that tasted, and therefore now senselessly abstained-from, ecstasy? What more of guilt can there be in ten or twenty score kisses than in that one which they have drunkenly given and taken? They see the sophistry dawning in one another’s hungry eyes; and once again their rebel arms half reach out reciprocally across a dwindled interval; but this time, to balance her former misleading of him, salvation--if that bitter abstinence can be called so--comes from her that at first was weakest. She tears her eyes away from him, and snatches a look round, as in preparation for flight. “We must not stay here any longer!” she says with an accent of ungovernable fear; and he as wildly acquiesces. “No,” he says; “you are right. I do not know what has come to me; but you are right not to trust me!” “It is I, _I_, _I_!” she repeats in distraught self-accusation. “You do not understand what a monster I am! I am to marry Rupert _next week_! I have been engaged to him all my life! I am all they possess in the world! Since I was a week old my uncle has overwhelmed me with his generous love; every one has said that I was more to him than even the boys. Now the one hope that is left for him lies----” Her rapid flow of self-accusation breaks off abruptly, stemmed by the awful obstacle placed by memory in its torrent course; and her face turns ghastly under his miserable eyes, as once more for the thousandth time, but with immeasurably deepened repulsion, she realizes the nature of the hope which is her uncle’s one remaining tie to life, and by whom to be fulfilled. It is by bearing children to Rupert that her intolerably heavy debt to them both is to be paid. For one insane moment her look flies to the pool. It must be under the little circles that the dancing flies are making on its surface that she can best cut the knot that is so far past untying. The broken voice of her fellow-sinner and fellow-sufferer calls her back. “And _I_! Do you forget that it was through me they lost poor Bill?” Possibly it is a relief to each to pile the chief weight of their common guilt on his and her own head respectively, in unconscious contrast to the shabby recriminations of our first parents; but of even this little alleviation they are soon robbed, all other consciousness merged in the killing sense of instant and eternal parting.