She stepped toward him and with both hands unwound the slender old-fashioned gold chain from her throat. She lifted her face, quivering, broken with feeling, and still streaming with tears, to his. She held out the amulet toward him. "Cresswell," poignantly, "will you take this now, my old talisman, with my heart's love?" He made one quick movement as if to take her in his arms and hold her close, close to his heart for ever. His face was irradiated, his cold eyes glowed with a warmth and fire that more mercurial and mutable natures can never know. Then the light went out of his eyes and face. It did not fade, it was as if it were extinguished by some strong effort of will. His arms fell to his sides. "My dear, my dear," his voice trembled, "how like your sweet, generous, prodigal nature! I see it all now, the reason for your pallor and heavy eyes. You have spent the day, since I left you this morning, in accusing and denouncing yourself until you have reached the frame of mind where you can only appease your offended and tyrannical conscience by some act of high sacrifice. And do you think I would accept it, poor, heroic, overwrought Dita? All day," that swift, flashing, heart-breaking smile of his gleamed a moment, "you have been convicting yourself of ingratitude, merely because I was offering you some of my money with the entirely selfish motive of securing my own happiness." "You are wrong, wrong," she cried vehemently, passionately. "What can I do to convince you? Oh, of course, you think that I am a creature of moods; you have every reason to think so; but what can I do, what can I say to convince you that I am not speaking from one of them now?" "Say nothing, dearest," he murmured deeply, soothingly; "say no more. I shall always remember the sweetness of this moment." "But I will not have it so," she cried. "You must, you must listen to me. You think that I love Eugene, that I have always loved Eugene. And I did not know, I did not know what love was. Eugene is charming and famous, and there was a sympathy between us, on one side of our natures. We have the same love of color. It is a passion with us. It spells music and poetry and all sorts of untranslatable things. It is something instinctive with us, something we were born with and we see shades and harmonies and values that other people do not. But this absolute understanding between us was only on one side of our natures, and yet sometimes it was so--so encompassing that I thought it embraced them all. So I did not know my own mind. I was puzzled, confused, always in doubt. And then, when I began really to--to flirt with Eugene, or so people construed it, it was when I was beginning to be bored with my marble court and my lacquered vase. I got so bored with being amused, just amused all the time." "Ah, that was where I made my great, my unforgivable mistake," he interrupted.