He took her hand and held it a moment, then drew it through his arm.  “Now tell me all,” he said, “They will be occupied for a long while.  The night is ours.”

“I have come here to tell you that I love you,” she said.  “Ah, can I make you tremble?  It was impossible for me not to tell you this; I could not rest in my retreat without having the last word with you, without having you know me.  And I want to tell you that I have suffered horribly; you may care to know that, for no one else in the world could have made me, no one else ever can.  Only your fingers could twist in my heart-strings and tear my heart out of my body.  I suffered first because I doubted you, then because I loved you, then the torture of jealousy and the pangs of parting, then those dreadful three months when I heard no word.  I could not stay at Casa Grande; everything associated with you drove me wild.  Oh, I have gone through all varieties!  But the last was the worst, after I heard from you again, and all other causes were removed, and I knew that you were well and still loved me:  the knowledge that I never could be anything to you,—­and I could be so much!  The torment of this knowledge was so bitter that there was but one refuge,—­imagination.  I shut my eyes to my little world and lived with you; and it seemed to me that I grew into absolute knowledge of you.  Let me tell you what I divined.  You may tell me that I am wrong, but I do not believe that you will.  I think that in the little time we were together I absorbed you.

“It seemed to me that your soul reached always for something just above the attainable, restless in the moments which would satisfy another, fretted with a perverse desire for something different when an ardent wish was granted, steeped, under all wanton determined enjoyment of life, with the bitter knowing of life’s sure impotence to satisfy.  Could the dissatisfied darting mind loiter long enough to give a woman more than the promise of happiness?—­but never mind that.

“With this knowledge of you my own resistless desire for variety left me:  my nature concentrated into one paramount wish,—­to be all things to you.  What I had felt vaguely before and stifled—­the nothingness of life, the inevitableness of satiety—­I repudiated utterly, now that they were personified in you; I would not recognize the fact of their existence. I could make you happy.  How could imagination shape such scenes, such perfection of union, of companionship, if reality were not?  Imagination is the child of inherited and living impressions.  I might exaggerate; but, even stripped of its halo, the substance must be sweeter and more fulfilling than anything else on this earth at least.  And I knew that you loved me.  Oh, I had felt that!  And the variousness of your nature and desires, although they might madden me at times, would give an extraordinary zest to life.  I was The Doomswoman no longer.  I was a supplementary being who could meet you in