Her eyes took fire, melted into tenderness, flamed once more, and then were quenched in rising tears. The voice in which she answered him seemed to come from another world. "Guy, I am not cold.... I'm not cold enough...." She flung herself away from his gesture of endearment and buried her cheeks in the cushion of the faded old settee. A wild calm had fallen upon the room, as if like the atmosphere before a thunder-storm it could register a warning of the emotional tempest at hand. The books, the furniture, the very pattern of birds and daisies upon the wall stood out sharply, almost luridly it seemed; the cuckoo from the passage called the hour in notes of alarm, as if a storm-cock were sweeping up to cover from dangerous open country. "What do you mean?" Guy asked. He knew that he was carrying the situation between Pauline and himself farther along than he had ever taken it since the night they met. Yet nothing could have stopped his course at this moment and, if the end should ruin his life, he would persist. "What do you mean?" he repeated. "Don't ask me," she sobbed. "It's cruel to ask me." "You mean your mother...." he began. "No, no, it's myself, myself." "My dearest, if it's only yourself, you need not be afraid. Why, you're so adorable...." Pauline seemed to cry out at the wound he had given her, and Guy started back, afraid for an instant of what he was provoking. "Don't treat me like a stupid little girl that petting can cure. I'm not adorable, I'm bad.... I'm ... oh, Guy, I am so unhappy!" "What do you mean by 'bad'?" he asked. "You talk as if we were.... Really, darling, you don't grasp life at all." "Guy," she said, turning to him with fierce earnestness, "don't persuade me I've done nothing. I have. I ought not. I've known that all the time. If you don't want me to be miserable for the rest of my life, you mustn't persuade me. I've been so weak...." He was annoyed at the exaggeration in her words and perplexed by her violence. "Anybody would think, you know," he told her, "that we have behaved terribly." "We have. We have." Her mouth was drawn with pain; her eyes were wild. "But we've not," Guy contradicted, mustering desperately all the forces of normality to allay Pauline's over-strained ideas. "We've not," he repeated. "You don't understand, darling Pauline, that when you talk like that you give the impression of something that is unimaginable of you. It's dreadful to have to talk about this, but it's better that we should discuss it than that you should torture yourself needlessly like this." "It's not what we've done so much," she said. "It's what you've made me think about you." Guy laughed rather miserably. "That seems a very trifling reason for so much ... well, you know, it's very nearly hysteria." "To you, perhaps," she retorted, bitterly. "To me it's like madness."