She looks at him, dumb, frenzied with the intense longing to throw herself actually at his feet, but yet held back by some irresistible power she cannot comprehend, any more than one can comprehend the stifling, overpowering force in a nightmare.

It is the simple result of her life, her breeding, her virtue, her character, her habits of control and reserve.  She is the fashionable, well-brought-up girl, with all her sensitive instincts in revolt against forcing herself upon a man indifferent to her, and full of an overwhelming instinctive timidity that her desire is wild to break down and cannot.

She stares at him, lost in a sense of bitter pain.  All her vigorous life seems wrung with pain, and in that torture, in which every nerve seems bruised and quivering, a faint smile twists at last the pale, trembling lips.  “You would have made a good vivisector!” she says.  Then, before he has time to answer, she turns the handle of the door behind her, opens it and goes out.

A second after the street door closes, and Stephen stands on the dining-room mat, looking down the empty hall.  Thoroughly disturbed and excited, with all his own passion surging heavily through his blood, and her last sentence—­that he does not understand any more than he understands his own cruelty—­ringing in his ears, he hesitates a minute, and then re-enters the dining-room, shuts to the door, and walks savagely up and down.

“Extraordinary girl!” he mutters.  “What does she want?  What can I do?  She knows I can say nothing at present, when I’m going into the work-house myself!  But what a splendid creature she is!  Lots of ‘go’ in her.  Well, I don’t care.  I’ll have her one day; but there’s no use making a lot of talk about it now.”

May walked away from his doorstep, no longer a sane human being, responsible for its actions.  The whole physical, nervous system, weakened by months of self-control, and night following night of sleeplessness, was hopelessly dislocated now.

The whole weight of her excited passion, flung back upon the sensitive brain, turned it from its balance.  It had been a brilliant brain, and that very excitability that had lent its brilliance was fatal to it now.

The hopeless passion ran like a corroding poison through the inflammable tissue.

She had put the matter to the test, and found that truth of which the mere possibility had been torture.  He had absolutely rejected her.  “He could not care for me,” she kept repeating, as the silent air round her seemed full of his cold, short laughs.

His passion for her was dead.  It had existed, surely—­those looks of his, the sudden violence of his touch when there was any excuse for the slightest contact with her—­or had it all been some curious dream?

She could not tell now, but whether it had been or not, it was no longer.  To her that seemed the only explanation of his words and tones.  To the tender female nature the depth of brutality in the passion of the male—­that is, in fact, the very sign of it—­remains always an enigma.