The other sighed and did not reply. Goetze filled one of the glasses and drank it off, then he resumed his seat by the window. A little later his friend took leave of him; reaching the street door he hesitated as if about to turn back, then he lifted the latch, and passed slowly out into the lighted street, closing the door gently behind him. The next morning the studio of Julian Goetze was locked. It remained locked all day, and within, stretched upon the floor, unconscious, lay the gifted man, and by his side was an empty flask. V. Perhaps Julian Goetze did not willingly abide by the somewhat fallacious reasoning of his friend. It is more than probable that each time he succumbed to the savage elements of his nature, he did so with reluctance and shame, with subsequent remorse, and good resolutions formed a score of times, perhaps, to be as often broken. As the weeks went by he became more and more involved in this singular affair. In a way he had found it possible, as his friend had once suggested, to be in love with two women at one time. When he was with Eva Delorme his love for the pure, beautiful girl seemed to take entire possession of his life. Evelin March, for the time, was as hateful to him as his own weakness, or was wholly forgotten. When in the presence of Evelin March his better self shrank away before the fierce heredity within him, and the face of Eva Delorme became only a dim, haunting ghost that taunted him with his treachery. Of the lives of these two he knew absolutely nothing. The evident distress which his reference to relatives and friends had occasioned Eva during their first meeting, had caused him carefully to avoid the subject afterward; and the other, who had never referred to her family, he had not cared to know. He had never even considered whether she was wife, maid or widow, until he suddenly became aware that the sentiment he had awakened within her was not, as he had at first supposed, a passing fancy, but a fierce passion of jealous and tyrannical love. She no longer rallied him, and parried his compliments with her light, pointed sarcasm, as she had done at first, but assumed an unmistakable bearing of ownership and possession--questioning him closely regarding other sitters and female acquaintances--while he writhed helplessly in the exquisite misery of a spell which he felt himself powerless to break. Thus far he had never surrendered himself entirely to this passion. More than once he had hesitated on the very brink of the precipice. Whether it was the haunting face of Eva Delorme that stayed him, or something in the manner of the other, he could not tell. One day he suddenly caught her in his arms. She suffered his embrace for a moment, then drew away from him. "When we are married, Paul," she said, tenderly, "I will take you to Italy, where in some beautiful villa we will give ourselves up wholly to our love. I am rich, Paul, rich; and it is all yours, but we must wait."