"Wasn't true," he repeated slowly. "Suppose that I've--wilfully--lied to you. Suppose that the hour I saw your face brought my lost dreams back to me; suppose that in you I found the woman for want of whom all my days have in despair been wasted; the one woman who could have made life splendid, and love passionate and ceaseless and supreme. Or, no! not even that, not even that! Suppose only that I felt your fascination as any man might feel it; that I was just bewitched by your beauty; that every day without its glamour was the darkness of death, and the thought of other men possessing it an unendurable torment. Suppose which you please, whichever seems to you simplest, or strangest, or most deplorable--and tell me again you think it was for my own sake that I was silent!" The musing tone in which he had begun was gone before he ended. He had turned to her, even as he leaned a little back and away against the end of the lounge; his shoulders were squared, and his brows drawn above the gray eyes which gazed almost defiantly into her face. And as his mood hardened hers had melted. Darkness had spread again across her eyes; spread as the night above a lighted river--its depths a-glimmer with strange reflections, and her lips had fallen softly apart from their disdainful smile into an unconscious baby sweetness, through which she breathed. She was listening with an absorbed intentness, with all her senses crowding to her ears. Even her splendid carriage was relaxed; her bosom drooped; dark hollows showed about her throat; her chin sank, till the white shoulder on which she leaned almost touched a tiny ear; the fan slipped from her other hand and hung by the loop about her wrist. Her eyes met his as he ended; and, as it were, beneath the long silence of that look he could hear the brushing sound of the breath between her parted lips, like the far-off pulse of the sea. But he missed so the other change which came to her; came, as it were, when the senses which had been away, so tensely listening, returned with their news. They brought back no erectness to her bearing, but deepened and coloured her drooping beauty till its languor became in itself a mien, a seduction that grew more perilous and overpowering with each quickening breath that filled her breast. But of all that Caragh noticed nothing. He saw only those wavering lights in the liquid darkness of her eyes, a darkness that spread about him till he felt the draught and swirl of its unknown waters. It was from that he was taken by the sudden fastening of the girl's hands about his face, and he woke with a flash of enlightenment to all that was in hers. He tried to shake his head, but she only tightened her fingers about it and drew it towards her, smiling, with a strength that astonished him. "Don't," he said.