“Poor little Mary MacLane!” said the Devil. He leaned toward me. He looked at me with those strange, wonderfully tender, divine steel-gray eyes. “Poor little Mary MacLane!” he said again in a voice that was like the Gray Dawn. And the eyes--the glance of the steel-gray eyes entered into me and thrilled me through and through. It frightened and soothed me. It racked and comforted me. It ravished me with inconceivable gentleness so that I bent my head down and sobbed as I breathed. “Don’t you know, you little thing,” said the man-devil, softly-compassionate, “your life will be very hard for you always--harder when you are happy than when you go in Nothingness?” “I know--I know. Nevertheless I want to be happy,” I sobbed. I felt a rush of an old thick, heavy anguish. “It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and all alone. Always I have been alone: when I was five and lay in the damp grass and tortured myself to keep back tears; and through the long, cold, lonely years till now--and now all the torture does not keep back the tears. There is no one--nothing--to help me bear it. It is more than pathetic when one is nineteen in all young, new feeling and sees Nothing anywhere--except long, dark, lonely years behind her and before her. No one that loves me and long, long years.” I stopped. The gray eyes were fixed on me. Oh, they were the steel-gray eyes!--and they had a look in them. The long, bitter pageant of my Nothingness mingled with this look and the coming together of these was like the joining of two halves. I do not know which brings me the deeper pain--the loneliness and weariness of my sand and barrenness, or the look in the steel-gray eyes. But as always I would gladly leave all and follow the eyes to the world’s end. They are like the sun’s setting. And they are like the pale, beautiful stars. And they are like the shadows of earth and sky that come together in the dark. “Why,” asked the Devil, “are you in love with me?” “You know so much--so much,” I answered. “I think it must be that. The wisdom of the spheres is in your brain. And so, then, you must understand me. Because no one understands all these smouldering feelings my greatest agony is. You must need know the very finest of them. And your eyes! Oh, it’s no matter why I’m in love with you. It’s enough that I am. And if you married me I would make you happier than you are.” “I am not happy at all,” said the man-devil. “I am merely contented.”