"For pity's sake don't look so kind, so sweet," he burst out vehemently, for even in the faint starlight he could see something of her eyes. "Tell me how vile I am--then I could go--then I could leave you! Listen to me, Marjory--" his voice grew calmer, and a sort of bitter entreaty came to its passionate anger--"I know quite well--I am certain that my only chance of living what you hold to be a worthy life lies with you, and yet I have renounced it--I do renounce it without a shadow of remorse. Is not that enough? You are my better self, my one hope of redemption, yet still I say, Adieu, my love, adieu, for evermore!" And then the half-seen softness of her face seemed to madden him. "Before God you _shall_ see me as I am. You _shall_ understand." His arms clasped her close, his reckless, passionate kiss was on her lips, and then---- Then he stood as it were before the tribunal which he had invoked--that tribunal of perfect knowledge, of blinding truth, in which alone lies the terror of judgment. "Marjory!" The whisper could scarcely be heard. "Marjory! is it true? My God! is it true that you love me?" He still held her, but with a touch which had changed utterly, and his tone was almost pitiful in its appeal. "Marjory! why--why did I not know? Why did you hide yourself from me?" "I did not know myself," she answered, and her voice had a ring of pain in it; "how could I know? But it would have made no difference--no difference to you." The keenest reproach could not have hit him so hard as this instinctive defence of her own ignorance, her own innocence; it pierced the armour of his worldliness and went straight to that part of his nature which, even at his worst, held fast to life in a sort of veiled self-contempt. "You are right; it would have made no difference, no difference to such as I am." Then in the darkness he was at her feet kissing the hem of her garment. "Adieu, my love; adieu for evermore!" The next instant the sound of his retreating footsteps broke the stillness, and she was alone. Alone, with a smile upon her face--a smile of infinite tenderness for his manhood and for her own new-found womanhood, which tingled in each vein and seemed to fill the whole world with the cry, "He loves me! he loves me!" So this was Love. This unreasoning joy, this absorbing desire to hap and to hold, to let all else slip by and be forgotten as nothing worth; to live for oneself alone--oneself, since he and she were one--one only! Yes; she loved him like that. And he? The memory of his voice, the clasp of his hand, the touch of his lips came back to her in a rush, dazing and bewildering her utterly, so that she stretched her arms into the night and whispered into the darkness: "Paul, come back! you must come back and tell me what it means. Paul! Paul!"