"You are not expected to say anything," she said, playfully. "That is the best of being a gigantic fraud like yourself; nobody ever does expect you to fulfil the ordinary requirements of every-day life. You might be a heathen god, who grins heartlessly while people try to propitiate him with the best they have to offer, and who eats up their gifts greedily when they are not looking." "Has all this any reference to me, might I ask?" "I don't believe you've got any ordinary human feeling," pursued Katharine. "I don't believe you care for anybody or anything, so long as you are left alone. Why don't you say something, instead of staring at me as though I were a curiosity?" "If you reflect, you will see that there has not been a single pause since you began to speak. Besides, why shouldn't you be catechised as well as myself? Where do you keep all your deep feeling, please? I haven't seen much of it, but perhaps I have no right to expect such a thing. No doubt you keep it all for some luckier person than myself." His tone was one of raillery, as hers had been when she began to talk. But she startled him, as she did sometimes, by a sudden change of mood; and she flashed round upon him indignantly. "It is horrible of you to laugh at me. You know you don't mean what you say; you know I have any amount of deep feeling. I hide it on purpose, because you don't like me to show it, you know you don't! I--I think you are very unkind to me." He reached out his hand and stroked her hair gently; she was sitting a little away from him, and he could see the sensitive curve of her lower lip. "Don't, child! One never knows how to take you. Another time you would have seen that I was only joking." "You have no right to joke about such a serious matter. You know it was a serious matter, now; wasn't it?" "The most serious in the universe," he assured her; and he brought his hand gently down her cheek, and laid it against her throat. "You are only laughing; you always laugh at me," she complained; but she bent her head, and kissed his hand softly. "I feel like a wolf, sometimes," she added, impetuously. "Didn't you have enough tea?" he said. But she knew by his tone that he was not laughing at her now, and she went on recklessly. "I am certain I could not love any one very much, without hating him too. It is a horrible dual feeling that tears one to pieces. Is it the badness in me, I wonder? Other people don't seem to feel like that when they are in love. Why is it?" "Because it is the same emotion, or set of emotions, that inspires both love and hatred," said Paul. "Circumstance does the rest, or temperament." "It is inexplicable," said Katharine solemnly. "I can understand killing a man, because he could not understand my love for him; or casting off my own child, because it was bored by my affection. I am quite sure," she added, quaintly, "that I should bore any one in a week, if I really loved him."