She curled her lip magnificently. “I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. I wish you would go to another tree. There is plenty of room in this lane for both of us.” “If I go, I shall go altogether.” She turned her shoulder on me. “I don’t want to be rude,” she said. Now, whatever the meaning of her presence here, her escapade was the maddest thing conceivable. I was quite at a loss how to account for it or persuade her from it, when suddenly the devil put a suspicion, half tormenting, half mocking, into my head, and I spoke recklessly, on the spur of it. “Mr Dando has gone away,” I said, “if it was any hope of running across him that brought you here.” She started--turned swiftly--and I saw that look on her face which I had seen once before. “Ira,” I cried, “don’t say it!” She threw away the dislocated umbrella, burst into tears, and ran out into the snow. But she had not gone ten paces, when she stumbled and sank to her knees. In an instant I was beside her. I did not know what had happened to me. Is this sort of thing after all a stroke--or perhaps a sudden possession? Something like a fiery pulse was hammering in my brain. I felt furious, savage, half suffocated--reckless with a lust of pain, to inflict it and invite it. We were Pan and Syrinx in the blasting weather. I was crazy to make a reed of her sweet red mouth, and breathe my soul of passion into it. This frenzy may have been long germinating in me. Its delivery came in a roar of flame--why at this moment more than at another I cannot say. Perhaps it was the sudden sense of my isolation, alone with her in that cold soft world--her helplessness--the appeal of her young troubled face--my own much troubled soul. I had no claim on her, nor hope nor right of claim that could be held to exonerate me. Who was I to cull such a flower to my bastardy? And yet I could not control this sudden insane feeling, nor deny myself the mad indulgence of it. Come what would, I would take for my own so much of her as my lips would carry. I lifted her in my arms, while she struggled weakly to repulse me.