"Hilda," said Odd, trying to speak calmly and reasonably, "you could not have tried to make me fond of you, since I had plainly proved to you for months that I adored you. You complain! You gain pity! When your cold little air of impersonality blinded even my eyes; when only my love for you gave me the instinctive uneasiness that led me, step by step--you retreating before me--to the final realizations; and final they are not, I could swear to it! Ah! some day, Hilda, some day I shall get at the real truth. I shall worm it from you. You shall be forced to tell me all that you have suffered." Hilda interrupted him with an "Oh!" from between clenched teeth. "Katherine was right," she said, "I have painted myself in pathetic colors. What a prig! What an egotist!" Her voice trembled on its low note of passionate self-scorn. "An egotist!" Odd burst into a loud laugh. "That caps the climax. Come, Hilda," he added, "don't be too utterly ridiculous. Facts are, happily, still facts; your toiling youth and utter sacrifice among them. As I say, I haven't yet sounded the depths of your self-renunciation, and, as I say, some day you will tell me, my Hilda; my brave, splendid, unconscious little child." Odd put his arms around her as he spoke, but Hilda's swift uprising from them had a lightning-like decision. "You dare speak so to me! After this! After our baseness! You dare to speak of some day? There will never be any day for us--together." "I say there will be, Hilda." "You think that I could ever forget my sister's misery; my shame and yours?" "You are raving, my poor child. I think that common sense will win the day." "That is a placid term for such degradation." "I see no degradation in a love that can rise above a hideous mistake." "You will find that hideous mistakes are things that cling. You can't mend a broken heart by marching over it." "One may avoid breaking another." "You make me scorn you. I am ashamed of loving you. Yes; there is the bitterest shame of all. I love you and I despise you. You are nothing that I thought you. You are weak, and cruel, and mean." "You, Hilda, are only cruel--unutterably cruel," said Odd brokenly. "I never wish to see you again." Hilda stared with dilated eyes into his eyes of pitiful appeal. "You have robbed my life of the little it had; you have robbed me of self-respect." "Shall I leave you, Hilda?" "You have broken her heart, and you have broken mine. Yes, leave me." "Good-bye," said Odd. He walked towards the door like a man stabbed to the heart, and half-unconscious. "Peter!" cried Hilda, in a hard voice. He turned towards her. She was standing in the middle of the room looking at him with the same fixed and dilated eyes. "What is it, my child?" Odd asked gently. "Kiss me good-bye!" He came to her, and she held out her arms. They clasped one another. "Must I leave you?" he asked, in a stammering voice. "Yes, yes, yes. Kiss me."