“I suppose you think I am happy in all this?”

He was silent.

“I suppose you think I find this heaven?”

At last he answered.  He came across to her; he stood looking at her with his strange new expression of inscrutability.

“Oh, Maxine!” he said, “why must you misjudge me?  Little Maxine, who could be taken in my arms this minute and carried away to my castle, like a princess of long ago—­but who would break her heart over the bondage!  I haven’t much, dear one, to justify my existence—­but the gods have given me intuition.  I do not think you are in heaven.”

He waited a moment, while in the sky above them the stars looked down impartially upon the white domes of the church and the beacons of pleasure in the city below.

“Maxine!  Shall I say the things for you that you want to say?”

She bent her head.

“Well, first of all, God help us, the world is a terrible tangle; and then you have a strange soul that has never yet half revealed itself.  You sent me away from you because you feared love; you called me back because you feared your fear—­”

“No!  No!  You are reasoning now, not justifying!  You are entrapping me!”

“Am I?”

“Yes, and I refuse to be entrapped!  I know love—­I know all the specious things that love can say; the talk of independence, the talk of equality!  But I know the reality, too.  The reality is the absolute annihilation of the woman—­the absolute merging of her identity.”

“So that is love?”

“That is love.”

He stood looking at her with a long profound look of deep restraint, of great sadness.

“Maxine,” he said, at last, “you have many gifts—­a high intelligence, a young body, a strong soul, but in the matter of love you are a little child.  To you, love is barter and exchange; but love is not that.  Love is nothing but a giving—­an exhaustless giving of one’s very best.”

She tried to laugh.  “I understand!  I should give!”

“No, sweet, you should not.  You cannot know the privileges of love, for you do not know love.”

“Oh, Ned!  How cruel!  How cruel!”

“You do not know love,” he spoke, very gently, without any bitterness, “and I do know it; for it has grown in me, day by day, in these long months away from you.  I am not to be praised, any more than you are to be blamed.  But I do love you—­with my heart and my soul—­with my life and my strength.  I would die for you, if dying would help you; and as it won’t, I will do the harder thing—­live for you.”

Her lips were parted, but they uttered no sound; her eyes, dark with thought, searched his face.

“Oh, Maxine!” He caught her hand.  “How low you have rated me—­to think I would wrest you from yourself!  Is it my place to make life harder for you?”

Still she gazed at him.  “I do not understand,” she said, in a frightened whisper.