“I am afraid. All the people are at home: perhaps they will come out to look for me.” “Aye, aye! But there was a time when you did not fear to stay out all night. Oh, how you have changed!” “Nonsense! What should have changed me?” They were silent, each embracing the other, and sometimes with a closer hug of sudden fondness which the memory of past times called up; and they sought each other’s lips with strong desire of love. But it would not do. Their souls were drifting farther and farther apart; each harboured bitter grudges against the other, and their wounds rankled so that their arms instinctively fell to their sides. They stood close, but like pillars of ice together; while words of tenderness and passion rose to their lips (but went no farther and died unuttered), their hearts were throbbing with sharp pain. “Yagna,” he said, very low, “do you love me?” “Why, I have already told you I cannot always come when you call,” she answered evasively; and yet she pressed closer to him—feeling sorry, regretful, almost ready to ask his pardon with tears for not being able to love him any more. He read her meaning; and her words chilled him to the marrow, and he quivered with the pang they gave him; resentment burst out in his heart, and with it came reproaches and invectives which he could not choke down, and a torrent of angry words. “You are a living lie! They all have fallen away from me, and so have you!—Love me? Aye, even as a dog that bares its teeth to bite loves me! Yes, I have seen through you clearly, and this I know: if folk were minded to slay me, you’d be the first to lend a rope; if to stone me, you’d throw the first stone!” “Antek!” she cried, aghast. “Be still, and hear me out!” he said sternly. “I have spoken the truth.... And since it has come to this—well, then, there now is naught in the world that I care for!” “I must be off; they are calling me,” she stammered, alarmed and trying to make her escape. But he seized her arm, so that she could not move, and went on in harsh menacing tones: “This, moreover, do I tell you ... for you have not then sense to see it for yourself: If I have fallen so low as this, it is through you—mark well—through you!... Because of you, the priest has rebuked me and driven me from the church! Because of you, the whole village shrinks from me as from one smitten with the plague.... I have borne all ... all.... Nor did I take revenge when he—that father of mine—gave into your hands so much of the land that’s my own!... And now—now—_you_ loathe me! Aye, turn and writhe and twist it as you will, you lie!—You are like the rest of them, you look on me as they do, and fear me as if I were a robber or a slayer of men!