"I parted from you in anger. I spoke roughly, cruelly. I said I would never come to you again," he goes on, looking at her white face--his own as white and sorrowful. "I have longed often to ask your pardon. I do it now. There is but one course open to me. I must leave this country. I must leave any place that has a memory of--you. I think sometimes I shall go mad if I don't. I think you would be shocked, Lorry, if you could look into my soul and see the utter blankness there. I am not old, and there is no ice in my veins yet, and forgetfulness won't come for trying any more than--love. Oh, if it only would--if it only would!" For an instant a sob rises in his throat and chokes his utterance. He rises, ashamed of his weakness, and paces the room with hurried, uneven steps. "I am forgetting myself. I did not mean to say such things," he says presently. "When I am with you I can think of nothing else. Oh, my darling! how _could_ you have given yourself away from me? Will ever any man love you as I have done, and do!" Lauraine's heart is rent asunder by the fierce, unstudied pathos of his words. She sees that her own weakness has wrecked two lives effectually, and now her whole soul is filled with anguish and with dread. "I can see at last that the only course for me to pursue is complete avoidance of your presence," he goes on, coming over to the mantelpiece as he speaks and leaning his arm upon it so as to keep his face out of her sight. "We should be all, or nothing, to each other; and I being mad and reckless, and you good and pure, it is easy to see which of the two is our fate." "Good and pure!" cries Lauraine, with sudden passionate shame; "had I been _that_ I should never have paltered with temptation one single moment. I should have been deaf to your entreaties and persuasions that summer night. I should have sent you from me then, not weakly yielded to a course of action that has made me as wretched as yourself." "You could never be _that_," he says, looking down at her anguished face. "You are too cold, too proud. But so much the better. I would not wish the worst foe I had to endure what I have endured for you, and shall endure, I suppose, till I die. That sounds rather like mock heroics," he adds, with a little bitter laugh; "but I think you know me better than to suppose it's 'put on.' I made up my mind when I saw you that I would tell you this farce could not go on. I shall tell Nan the same. She's a good little thing, and is worth a better fate than she would have as my wife. God! The mockery of that word! At night sometimes it is as if a chorus of fiends were jabbering it in my ears, and driving me mad with the horrible sound." "What will you say--how explain?" falters Lauraine. "Oh, you need not be afraid that your name will suffer," he says, with bitterness. "I shall take care of that. Let her think me the mean, contemptible cur I am." The hot cruel colour flies into Lauraine's cheeks.