She uttered these last words sorrowfully, her hands clasped in her lap, and her eyes sinking to the floor.  A silence ensued.  Then Theron reached a groping hand out for his hat, and, rising, walked with a lifeless, automatic step to the door.

He had it half open, when the impossibility of leaving in this way towered suddenly in his path and overwhelmed him.  He slammed the door to, and turned as if he had been whirled round by some mighty wind.  He came toward her, with something almost menacing in the vigor of his movements, and in the wild look upon his white, set face.  Halting before her, he covered the tailor-clad figure, the coiled red hair, the upturned face with its simulated calm, the big brown eyes, the rings upon the clasped fingers, with a sweeping, comprehensive glare of passion.

“This is what you have done to me, then!”

His voice was unrecognizable in his own ears—­hoarse and broken, but with a fright-compelling something in it which stimulated his rage.  The horrible notion of killing her, there where she sat, spread over the chaos of his mind with an effect of unearthly light—­red and abnormally evil.  It was like that first devilish radiance ushering in Creation, of which the first-fruit was Cain.  Why should he not kill her?  In all ages, women had been slain for less.  Yes—­and men had been hanged.  Something rose and stuck in his dry throat; and as he swallowed it down, the sinister flare of murderous fascination died suddenly away into darkness.  The world was all black again—­plunged in the Egyptian night which lay upon the face of the deep while the earth was yet without form and void.  He was alone on it—­alone among awful, planetary solitudes which crushed him.

The sight of Celia, sitting motionless only a pace in front of him, was plain enough to his eyes.  It was an illusion.  She was really a star, many millions of miles away.  These things were hard to understand; but they were true, none the less.  People seemed to be about him, but in fact he was alone.  He recalled that even the little child in the car, playing with those two buttons on a string, would have nothing to do with him.  Take his money, yes; take all he would give her—­but not smile at him, not come within reach of him!  Men closed the doors of their houses against him.  The universe held him at arm’s length as a nuisance.

He was standing with one knee upon a sofa.  Unconsciously he had moved round to the side of Celia; and as he caught the effect of her face now in profile, memory-pictures began at once building themselves in his brain—­pictures of her standing in the darkened room of the cottage of death, declaiming the confiteor; of her seated at the piano, under the pure, mellowed candle-light; of her leaning her chin on her hands, and gazing meditatively at the leafy background of the woods they were in; of her lying back, indolently content, in the deck-chair on the yacht of his fancy—­that yacht which a few hours before had seemed so brilliantly and bewitchingly real to him, and now—­now—!