"Do you think," she asked at last, "that anything I could have done--he could have felt that I--encouraged him?" "I don't think anything more about it," Sommers answered, closing his lips firmly. "It is part of the mire; we must avert our eyes, Alves." But in spite of his mild, even gentle way of dealing with the affair, he could not fall into his routine of work. He got up from the table and, finding the room too warm, threw open a window to let the clear, cold winter air rush over his face. He stood there a long time, plunged in thought, while Alves waited for him to come back to her. At last she could bear it no longer. She crept over to his side and placed her head close to his. "I wish you would even hate me, would be angry, would _feel_ it," she whispered. "Will you ever care to kiss me again?" "Foolish woman!" Sommers answered, taking her face in his hands. "Why should _that_ make any difference to me, any more than if a drunken brute had struck you?" "But it does," she asserted sadly. "Everything does, Howard--all the past: that I let my husband touch me; that I had to live with him; that you had to know it, him--it all makes, oh, such a difference!" "No," he responded, in a high voice. "By God, it makes no difference--only one thing." He paused. Then with a wrench he went on, "Alves, did you--did you--" But he could not make himself utter the words, and before he had mastered his hesitation she had broken in impetuously: "No, I am right; the great happiness that I wanted to give you must come from the spirit and body of a woman untouched by the evil of living in the world. The soiled people like me should not--" He closed her lips with a kiss. "Don't blaspheme our life," he answered tenderly. "One cannot live unspotted except in the heart." He kissed her again, tenderly, lovingly. But the kiss did not assuage her burning shame; it savored of pity, of magnificent charity. CHAPTER VIII One still, frozen winter day succeeded another in changeless iteration. The lake was a solid floor of gray ice as far as one could see. Along the shore between the breakwaters the ice lay piled in high waves, with circles of clear, shining glass beyond. A persistent drift from the north and east, day after day, lifted the sheets of surface ice and slid them over the inner ledges. At night the lake cracked and boomed like a battery of powerful guns, one report starting another until the shore resounded with the noise. The perpetual groaning of the laboring ice, the rending and riving of the great fields, could be heard as far inshore as the temple all through the still night.