of her pose, but after a moment she lifted her drooping eyelids and met his tense and inquisitive stare by a look that had all the formless eloquence of a cry.  It penetrated, it stirred without informing; it was the very essence of anguish stripped of words that can be smiled at, argued away, shouted down, disdained.  It was anguish naked and unashamed, the bare pain of existence let loose upon the world in the fleeting unreserve of a look that had in it an immensity of fatigue, the scornful sincerity, the black impudence of an extorted confession.  Alvan Hervey was seized with wonder, as though he had seen something inconceivable; and some obscure part of his being was ready to exclaim with him:  “I would never have believed it!” but an instantaneous revulsion of wounded susceptibilities checked the unfinished thought.

He felt full of rancorous indignation against the woman who could look like this at one.  This look probed him; it tampered with him.  It was dangerous to one as would be a hint of unbelief whispered by a priest in the august decorum of a temple; and at the same time it was impure, it was disturbing, like a cynical consolation muttered in the dark, tainting the sorrow, corroding the thought, poisoning the heart.  He wanted to ask her furiously:  “Who do you take me for?  How dare you look at me like this?” He felt himself helpless before the hidden meaning of that look; he resented it with pained and futile violence as an injury so secret that it could never, never be redressed.  His wish was to crush her by a single sentence.  He was stainless.  Opinion was on his side; morality, men and gods were on his side; law, conscience—­all the world!  She had nothing but that look.  And he could only say: 

“How long do you intend to stay here?”

Her eyes did not waver, her lips remained closed; and for any effect of his words he might have spoken to a dead woman, only that this one breathed quickly.  He was profoundly disappointed by what he had said.  It was a great deception, something in the nature of treason.  He had deceived himself.  It should have been altogether different—­other words—­another sensation.  And before his eyes, so fixed that at times they saw nothing, she sat apparently as unconscious as though she had been alone, sending that look of brazen confession straight at him—­with an air of staring into empty space.  He said significantly: 

“Must I go then?” And he knew he meant nothing of what he implied.

One of her hands on her lap moved slightly as though his words had fallen there and she had thrown them off on the floor.  But her silence encouraged him.  Possibly it meant remorse—­perhaps fear.  Was she thunderstruck by his attitude? . . .  Her eyelids dropped.  He seemed to understand ever so much—­everything!  Very well—­but she must be made to suffer.  It was due to him.  He understood everything, yet he judged it indispensable to say with an obvious affectation of civility: