“So you will go—­to-morrow,” he said bitterly, “back to the great public that will possess you, and I shall remain—­here, alone.”

“It must be so.”

He felt suddenly an impulse he had not felt before, an instinct to make her suffer a little.  He said brutally: 

“But you want to go!”

She did not answer, but, in the obscurity, he knew her large eyes were searching his face.  He felt ashamed of what he had said, and yet because she made no protestation, he persisted: 

“You have left off your jewels, those jewels you can’t do without.”

“Not to-night.”

“You who are never happy without them—­why not to-night?”

As, carried away by the jealousy of what lay beyond, he was about to continue, she laid her fingers on his lips, with a little brusk, nervous movement of her shoulders.

“Don’t—­you don’t understand.”

But he understood and he resented the fact that she should have put aside the long undulating rope of pearls, the rings of rubies and emeralds that seemed as natural to her dark beauty as the roses to the spring.  He had tried to understand her woman’s nature, to believe that no memory yet lingered about them, to accept without question what had never belonged longed to their life together, and remembering what he had fought down he thought bitterly: 

“She has changed me more than I have changed her.  It is always so.”

She moved a little, her pose, with instinctive dramatic sense, changing with her changing mood.

“Do not think I don’t understand you,” she said quietly.

“What do you understand?”

“It hurts you because I wish to return.”

“That is not so, Madeleine,” he said abruptly.  “You know what big things I want you to do.”

“I know—­only you would like me to say the contrary—­to protest that I would give it all up—­be content to be with you alone.”

“No, not that,” he said grudgingly, “and yet, this last night—­here—­I should like to hear you say the contrary.”

She laughed a low laugh and caught his hand a little tighter.

“That displeases you?”

“No, no, of course not!” Presently she added with an effort: 

“There is so much that we must say to each other and we have not the courage.”

“True, all summer we have never talked of what must come after.”

“I want you to understand why I go back to it all, why I wish every year to be separated from you—­yes, exactly, from you,” she added, as his fingers contracted with an involuntary movement.  “Ben, what has come to me I never expected would come.  I love, but neither that word nor any other word can express how absolutely I have become yours.  When I told you my life, you did not wonder how difficult it was for me to believe that such a thing could be possible.  But you convinced me, and what has come to me has come as a miracle.  I adore you.  All my life has been lived just for this great love; ah yes, that’s what I believe, what I feel.”  She leaned swiftly to him and allowed him to catch her to him in his strong arms.  Then slowly disengaging herself, she continued, “You are a little hurt because I do not cry out what you would not accept, because I do not say that I would give up everything if you asked it.”