“You cannot say you are dead with Siegmund,” he cried brutally. She shuddered, clasped her burning arms on her breast, and looked into the fire. “You are not dead with Siegmund,” he persisted, “so you can’t say you live with him. You may live with his memory. But Siegmund is dead, and his memory is not he—himself,” He made a fierce gesture of impatience. “Siegmund now—he is not a memory—he is not your dead red leaves—he is Siegmund Dead! And you do not know him, because you are alive, like me, so Siegmund Dead is a stranger to you.” With her head bowed down, cowering like a sulky animal, she looked at him under her brows. He stared fiercely back at her, but beneath her steady, glowering gaze he shrank, then turned aside. “You stretch your hands blindly to the dead; you look backwards. No, you never touch the thing,” he cried. “I have the arms of Louisa always round my neck,” came her voice, like the cry of a cat. She put her hands on her throat as if she must relieve an ache. He saw her lip raised in a kind of disgust, a revulsion from life. She was very sick after the tragedy. He frowned, and his eyes dilated. “Folk are good; they are good for one. You never have looked at them. You would linger hours over a blue weed, and let all the people down the road go by. Folks are better than a garden in full blossom—” She watched him again. A certain beauty in his speech, and his passionate way, roused her when she did not want to be roused, when moving from her torpor was painful. At last— “You are merciless, you know, Cecil,” she said. “And I will be,” protested Byrne, flinging his hand at her. She laughed softly, wearily. For some time they were silent. She gazed once more at the photograph over the piano, and forgot all the present. Byrne, spent for the time being, was busy hunting for some life-interest to give her. He ignored the simplest—that of love—because he was even more faithful than she to the memory of Siegmund, and blinder than most to his own heart. “I do wish I had Siegmund’s violin,” she said quietly, but with great intensity. Byrne glanced at her, then away. His heart beat sulkily. His sanguine, passionate spirit dropped and slouched under her contempt. He, also, felt the jar, heard the discord. She made him sometimes pant with her own horror. He waited, full of hate and tasting of ashes, for the arrival of Louisa with the coffee. II Siegmund’s violin, desired of Helena, lay in its case beside Siegmund’s lean portmanteau in the white dust of the lumber-room in Highgate. It was worth twenty pounds, but Beatrice had not yet roused herself to sell it; she kept the black case out of sight.