Then harshly, rudely, the change; the voice which had seemed to caress each word was now like a lash. "Suppose you didn't have the luxury of giving yourself up to your own heart? Suppose that every day and night of your life, you had to fight memory, knowing it held nothing for you but jeers and mockery and things too damnable for words! Suppose you had to fairly forbid yourself to think of the beautiful things of life! Suppose that what had been the most beautiful moments of your life were made, by memory, the most hideous! Suppose the memory of his kiss always brought with it the consciousness of his falseness; that his words of love never came back to you without the knowledge that he had been laughing at you in his heart all the time! Suppose you could never get away from the damning truth that what you gave from the depth of your heart was tossed aside with a laugh! Suppose you had given the great passion of your life, the best that was in you, to a liar and a hypocrite! Suppose you had been made a fool of!--easy game! _Then_ what of life?--your belief in love?--thoughts of fate? Great God, woman, can't you see what you have got?" After the throbbing moment which followed that there came a great quiet; slowly passion settled to sadness. He seemed to have forgotten her, to be speaking instead to his own heart, as he said, very low, his voice touched with the tenderness of unrelinquished dreams: "To have had one hour--just one perfect hour, and then the memory of that untarnished forever--it would be enough." Her heart rushed passionately to its own defence; she wanted to tell him no! She wanted to tell him it was cruel to be permitted to live for a time in a beautiful country, only to be turned out into the dark. She wanted to tell him that to know love was to need it forever. But his head had fallen to his hand; he seemed entirely lost to her, and even now she knew his answer to what she would say. "But you _had_ it," he would reply. "The cruel thing would be to awaken and find no such country had ever existed." They would get no closer than that, and with new passionateness her heart went out to Karl. Karl would understand it as it was to her! He too felt that they could come no closer than this. They sat there in the gathering twilight with their separate thoughts as souls sit together almost in the dark, seeing one another in shadow, across dim spaces.