"But you wouldn't!" he said quietly. "Luckily, I understand you!" He shook his head. "Acting--always acting!" "No!" "Yes--acting with yourself, dramatizing a situation. But that's all! Just another precipice! Dangerous for you, but fatal to me if I were to believe you!" "Oh, I swear to you that isn't so!" she cried, with a gesture that he appreciated, even at the moment, for its dramatic verity. "Come!" he said quietly. "Let's be good comrades. Don't dabble with fire!" "You think, when you leave, you will never see me again!" she said swiftly, surprising him by the penetration of her intuition. She went to him, fastening her fingers about him like the tendrils of clinging ivy. "Well, Your Honor, I will never let you go! Remember that! If you don't come, I will go and get you! You have caught me, and you can never get rid of me. I swear it!" She sprang away quickly, affecting nonchalance. The door opened and Snyder came in, stopping short at the sight of the two figures, indistinct in the twilight. "Come in, come in, Snyder!" Doré said hastily. "My friend, Judge Massingale." Snyder gave him her hand abruptly, with a quick antagonistic movement, watching his embarrassed face keenly. "Just came up to get my coat," said Doré glibly. "Going out for dinner!" They left hurriedly, ill at ease. On the second stairway, in the dark, she stopped him, and approaching her lips so close to his ear that they almost brushed it, said: "I am not acting; I mean everything. It is to be the great thing in my life!" He laughed, but did not reply. "I understand her now," he said to himself, with a feeling of strength. "She may deceive herself; she can not blind me!" Later he added uneasily: "If I ever believe her, I am lost!" But Doré believed implicitly what she had said. At the bottom, what was working in her soul? That instinct, second only to the nesting instinct, in woman, that great protective impulse which alone explains a thousand incomprehensible attachments. He had taken her, caught her soul and her imagination, lawlessly, unfairly perhaps; but there it remained, an imperishable mark. Only one thing could atone to her self-respect--the glorification of this accident. Only when into his acquiring soul had come an immense overpowering love, could a renunciation be possible which would live in her memory, not to recall blushes of anger and shame, but to give the satisfaction of a heroic sacrifice. But the danger lay in his incredulity and resistance! CHAPTER XX