"Ah, hold me strongly!" she cried, quivering and breathless. "More--more! You are so kind--you are so patient with me, Your Honor! And I have been so cruel. How I must have plagued you! Forgive me! Forgive me! Forgive me!" "It's nothing--nothing!" he said, troubled with her embrace, which had never seemed so complete an abnegation, a surrender and a seeking. "Oh, I'll make it up to you now!" she cried, her cheeks wet. She clung to him, craving affection, the pain of his clutching arms, the strength of his male body, in a strange impulse, the inconscient seeking from one man what another had roused. Did she know herself to whom she was clinging, or why she had such a wild hunger in her sorrow-racked body? She clung to him, but she did not cry his name! CHAPTER XXVI As January went shivering into the slush and fury of February, and the fatal tenth of March drew nearer, Dodo found herself approaching the great test of her character. All the different dramatizations that she had permitted herself, with her joyful instinct toward comedy, suddenly loomed before her, no longer trivial and facile, but reaching into seriousness, fraught with the elements of tragedy. Impossible to describe the fever of emotion into which she now plunged, acting and reacting, perpetually in a whirl, avoiding solitude and rest, trying every impulse, frantically proceeding from one flirtation to another, aghast at the necessity which she had imposed on herself of definitely choosing what her life should be. She was rarely in bed before the wan grays were scurrying in their pallid flight before the dawn, like thieves across the city. She saw the heavy, jangling milk-wagons plodding to their deliveries, abhorrent figures combing the refuse of yesterday, groups in rags asleep on iron gratings which sent the warm blast of underground furnaces into the shivering winds. Often, heavy-eyed and vibrantly awake, returning in singing parties of four or six from long hours of dancing, she came suddenly upon night shifts emerging from their slavery in the bowels of the earth, black shadows trooping up from the flare of kerosene lamps, an underworld which stared at the revelers in brutish hostility.