‘Lest I should kill him!’ she said in a thrilling whisper. ‘I was afraid of myself! I thought that if I had to see him enter my room with that confident smile of his, that easy manner, that grace of a supreme conceit swaying his every movement, while I all the time knew the fraud he was practising on me, the hypocrisy of his embrace, the lie of his kiss on my lips, I might, in the rush of remembering how I had loved him, murder him! It was possible; I knew it; I realised it; I confessed it before God as a sin; but despite of prayer and confession, the devil’s thought remained!—I might do it in a moment of fury,—in a moment when wronged love clamoured for vengeance and would listen to no appeal,—and so I fled from temptation; but now I think the sea and air have absorbed all my evil desires, for they have gone!—and I shall try to be content now, content with solitude, till I die!’ Valdis was still silent. She leant over the pier, looking dreamily down into the darkly-heaving sea. ‘Life at best is such a little thing!’ she said, ‘One wonders sometimes what it is all for! You see crowds of men and women rushing hither and thither, building this thing, destroying that, scheming, contriving, studying, fretting, working, courting, marrying, bringing up their children, and it is quite appalling to think that the same old road has been travelled over and over again since the very beginning! All through the Ptolemies and the Cæsars,—imagine! Exactly the same old monotonous course of human living and dying! What a waste it seems! Optimists say we have progressed; but then are we sure of that? And then one wants to know where the progression leads to; if we are going forward, what _is_ the “forward?” Myself, I think the great charm of life is love; without love life is really almost valueless, and surely not worth the trouble of preserving. Don’t you agree with me?’ She looked up, and, looking, saw his eyes filled with such an intensity of misery as touched and startled her. He made a slight gesture of appeal. ‘For God’s sake, don’t speak to me like this!’ he whispered; ‘You torture me!’ She still gazed at him, half wondering, half fearing. He was silent for a few minutes, then resumed slowly in quiet tones. ‘You are so candid in your own nature that you can neither wear a disguise yourself nor see when it is worn by others,’ he said; ‘and just as you have never suspected your husband of infidelity, you have never suspected me—of love. I suppose you, with the majority, have looked upon me as merely the popular mime of the moment, feigning passions I cannot feel, and dividing what purely human emotions my life allows me still to enjoy, among the light wantons of the stage, who rejoice in a multitude of lovers. It is possible you would never believe me capable of a deep and lasting love for any woman?’