But the hot questions would rush upon him and he would answer them as he had answered such questions for the past six weeks. "Was it my fault? Could I have done anything? Was it taken away because I didn't want it to come?" "Mariana!" "Do you remember that I said I hoped it would die? You knew they were idle words, didn't you? You knew that I didn't mean it?" "Of course, my dearest." "But somebody told me once that for every idle word we would be held to account. Is this the account?" "Hush." For a moment she would lie silent, and then, rising again, the torrent would come. "Perhaps if I had not left the window open that first warm day. And I did not send for the doctor at once. I thought it was only fretful. Perhaps--" "You could have done nothing." "I did not know. I was so ignorant. I should have studied. I should have asked questions." Then she would turn towards him, laying her hot hand upon his arm. "Tell me that it was not my fault. Tell me--tell me!" "It was not. It was not." "But I want her so. I want to feel her. I want to feel her soft and warm in my arms. Oh, my baby!" And so the summer nights would wear away. But as time went on a reactionary lethargy pervaded her. Her vitality being spent, she was left limp and devoid of energy. For hours she would lie motionless in the heated room, the afternoon sun, intensified by the reflected glare of pressed brick, streaming upon her, and she would appear to be indifferent to both heat and glare. From Algarcife she turned with an avoidance which was almost instinctive. When he touched her she shrank into silence, when he spoke she met his words with lethargic calm. It was as if the demands he made upon her emotional nature became irksome to her when that nature lay dormant. "I suppose I love you," she said one day, in answer to his questions. "I think I do, but I don't feel it. I don't feel anything. I only want to forget." "Not to forget me, Mariana?" Mariana shook her head impatiently. "Do you know," she continued, "that the thought of feeling makes me positively sick? I haven't any left, and I don't like it in other people. I am tired of it all." "And of me?" "I don't know. I think not, but I oughtn't to have married you." "Mariana!" "It would have been much better. You said so yourself once. But love is so strange. It makes people do such absurd things." Algarcife did not reply. There was resentment in the look he bent upon her. He had not learned that even a woman in love is not a woman always in love--that love, in common with all other conditions, is subject to the forces which attract and repel, and that its equilibrium is maintained by a logical adjustment of opposites. To him Mariana's alienation betokened a fundamental failing in her nature, and with the thought he experienced a dull anger.