Ashe came--unwillingly. She perceived the reluctance, and with a flaming face she motioned him back, while she controlled herself enough to pour out her story. Presently Ashe was able to reconstruct with tolerable clearness what had occurred. Cliffe, intoxicated by the long day of intimacy and of solitude, by Kitty's beauty and Kitty's folly, aware that parting was near at hand, and trusting to the wildness of Kitty's temperament, had suddenly assumed the language of the lover--and a lover by no means uncertain of his ultimate answer. So long as they understood each other--that, indeed, for the present, was all he asked. But she must know that she had broken off his marriage with Mary Lyster, and reopened in his nature all the old founts of passion and of storm. It had been her sovereign will that he should love her; it had been achieved. For her sake--knowing himself for the seared and criminal being that he was--for Ashe's sake--he had tried to resist her spell. In vain. A fatal fusion of their two natures--imaginations--sympathies--had come about. Each was interpenetrated by the other; and retreat was impossible. A kind of sombre power, indeed--the power of the poet and the dreamer--seemed to have spoken from Cliffe's strange wooing. He had taken no particular pains to flatter her, or to conceal his original hesitation. He put her own action in a hard, almost a brutal light. It was plain that he thought she had treated her husband badly; that he warned her of a future of treachery and remorse. At the same time he let her see that he could not doubt but that she would face it. They still had the last justifying cards in their hands--passion, and the courage to go where passion leads. When those were played, they might look each other and the world in the face. Till then they were but triflers--mean souls--fit neither for heaven nor for hell.