Now he had sealed the vial of her love. And, unless his hand knew the cunning of it and could break it open again, sealed it must remain till death. Had he but looked upon her first as now, but spoken as now, how different she might have made it! But even with his eyes upon her once more kind, and his voice in her ear once more gentle; with his hand trembling upon the stone of the bench, but a tiny span from hers; with the atmosphere of his presence enfolding her, she felt that they were still drifting apart further and further across the waste of waters. “What have I said to you to-night?” he asked, and drew his hand across his brow. “Forgive me, you have always been very good to me. I owe you a great deal.” She smiled with a welling bitterness. “If you speak of owing,” she said, “I owe you the very bread I eat.” “And never felt it till to-night,” she added in her heart, but could not speak those words aloud because, in spite of everything, she loved him with that woman’s love that is kept tender by the mother instinct.—She could not hurt him who had hurt her so much. His troubled gaze on her widened and then became abstracted. “I have become a creature of the night,” said he, almost as if to himself. “For, by the light of day I cast such shadows as I go, that nothing, I think, could prosper near me. Always I have paid such toll for every good that it had been better I had never known it. The old curse is still upon me. Even for the comfort of your smile, Ellinor, I have had to pay.” She drew a breath as if she would speak, but closed her lips proudly again. She could not plead for his happiness, for now that meant pleading for herself. “Let me tell you,” said he once more, “what life has done to me.” “I am listening,” she replied coldly, after a pause. “Thank you—you are always patient with me. It is the last time that I shall ever bring a human being into my confidence, but I think you have a right to know, Ellinor, why I have been so moved to-day; to know how it is that events have once more shown me my own unfitness to mix with my fellow-creatures.” He paused a second, then went on, resentment once more threatening in his voice like distant thunder. “I cannot do with the meanness, the small duplicities, the little treacheries. Oh, God, duplicity is never small, and to me there is no little treachery. Ellinor, let but the tiniest rift be sprung in the crystal, and its note can never ring pure again. Oh, Ellinor, had you forgotten that?” He stared at her with a new passion of reproach. But she sat, marble-still, with downcast lids: a cold white thing in the moonlight. And that passion of his that might just then have broken into tenderness, like a wave upon a gentle beach, recoiled upon itself as it met the barrier of her high hard pride.