“Why do you seek me? Could you not be content to have brought into my peace—God knows how hardly won!—this disturbance, this trouble, this disillusion? Have you not shown me once again that no woman, however kind, can be true; however fair but must be false; however straight-limbed, but must be tortuous of mind; however sweet to draw a man to her but must be black at heart! Is not that enough? I had gone back to my stars, back to all they mean to me; they had called me from among that ignoble crew where you—oh, incredible! seem to have found yourself so well! I had gone back to them, to their serenity, to their high communion.... Why did you call me down? Take your false troubling beauty from this my own peace ground!” “But David! But, dear cousin, what insanity is this?” “No,” he cried, with outflung hands beating back the sudden tender relaxation in her voice, the loosening movement of her folded arms under their mantle. “No,” he repeated loudly and harshly. “Once deceived where I most loved! Again deceived where I most trusted! Deceived again where nature, common blood, and family honour, should have most bound to faithfulness—it is enough! I have done with life. I will never again risk my hard-won peace of mind—life’s most precious possession—upon the frail stake of another’s loyalty. I have no friend, I have no sister. Ellinor, I will love no woman!” His loud voice suddenly sank; and towards the last sentences, with a falling of her high spirit of anger, she saw him resume the old unnatural look, the old passionless tone of detachment and renunciation. The phrase with which he concluded rang in her ears more like a knell of all her secret hopes than the conventional offence. “Oh,” said she, and the clear sweet note was shot through with a tremor of pain, “neither friend nor kin nor love? It is a hard sentence, David! Is it not as bad to mistrust truth as to break troth?” But though her words were gentle she felt herself more aloof as she spoke than at any moment of their interview. Their two souls were drawing away from each other in the storm as the same wind and the same waves may part consorting vessels. She moved, as to leave him, when he arrested her. “You know the story of my life,” said he. “Stay, Ellinor, the night is mild.” He put out his hand; but hesitated, and did not touch her. The frenzy of passion had left him, with that sudden change of mood that marks the fevered brain. She sat down on the parapet without a word. The night was mild, as he had said; yet, even under her improvised mantle she was cold—cold to the soul.