She sought the gloom beyond the fireplace, in order that her changed face might not betray her. But even here her paleness was emphasized, and her eyes, with faint purple streaks below them, took on a look of deeper anxiety. Her features began to quiver as if her soul were revealing itself beneath a transparent mask. "What has happened?" She managed to reply: "A great mistake. Because that picture seemed congenial to you in those lonely places you thought that the original must be the same? You were wrong. Physically and temperamentally we belong to different worlds. You couldn't rest in mine, and I couldn't enter yours. If you knew me," she added, in a hushed voice, "you'd find me contemptible, in all my weaknesses." She lowered her head, then, raising her eyes, which were full of fear, besought him, "Tear it out of your heart! Destroy it!" "There, it's done. How easy it was to obey you!" And they stood face to face in a pallor that was like a scintillation of white-hot metal, both knowing that their lips, though they uttered first a thousand similar phrases, would presently be united. Then he came close, catching in his strong grasp her writhing hands. But she stopped him with a look like a flashing sword--a look as poignant as though they had been lovers for years and now must love no longer. And so, in fact, they had been, heart drawn to heart by a strange likeness of accidental or of fatal events, one longing groping through space toward another longing. Apart, just by aid of their imaginations, they had progressed already from indefinite to precise emotions, from vague to fixed visions, each attaining in thought a consummation that mocked this present struggle. And this profound mutual intimacy, an accomplished fact in the realm of mind, was suddenly projected into the physical atmosphere, so that the glances of these two, who had just now met each other, clashed in an almost terrible intimacy, as though the question were not "Never," but "Never again." Wrenching her hands away, she made a despairing gesture. "Tear it out," she repeated. "It's only by doing so that you can please me." "Will you help me to kill it? Will you lend a hand by making your beauty hideous, your nature repulsive? Come and take a drive with me. Just an hour or two. How long do you need to destroy it?" "Ah," she breathed, closing her eyes in pain. In a broad-brimmed hat that matched her muslin gown she went down the steps to his car. The high, gray walls of the house disappeared behind a rush of trees; the conical turret roofs of slate sank quickly away. From the terrace Cornelius Rysbroek stared at the distant gateway through which they had vanished.