“But I do not love you!  I never meant that I loved you!” she cried.

At her words his arms dropped to his sides, and he stood as if turned to stone, with only his questioning eyes and the vivid red of his hair seeming alive.  There was no need now for her to struggle.  At her first movement to escape he had released her and drawn to a distance.

“You don’t love me?” he stammered.  “Why, I saw it.  I’ve seen it for weeks.  I see it now in your face.”

“You see nothing—­nothing.”  She denied it bitterly.  “I liked you as a friend.  I did not think of this.  I never suspected it.  I don’t love you.  I don’t love you in the least.”

He was very still.  The jubilant spirit of the spring had ebbed away from his look, and even in the height of her anger she was struck by the change in his face.

“I don’t believe you,” he said gravely after a minute.  “I don’t believe you.”

“You must believe me.  I don’t love you.  I have never thought of you except as a friend.  I have loved another man all my life.”

Her voice rose accusingly, triumphantly, and so fervent was her look that she might have been repeating a creed.  It was as if she hoped by convincing him to persuade her own rebellious heart of the truth she proclaimed.

Now at last he understood.  She had been lucid enough even for the crystalline lucidity of his thought.

“I am sorry.  I made a mistake,” he said quietly, and after the exultant note of a few moments ago there was a dull level of flatness in his voice.  “I am sorry.  There don’t seem to be anything else that I can say or do, but—­but it wouldn’t have happened if I had understood—­” He paused, looked at her closely for a minute, and then added stubbornly, with an echo of the old confidence in his tone:  “I still don’t believe it.”

“It is true, nevertheless.”  She was trembling with indignation, and this indignation, in spite of her natural fairness, was not directed against herself, against her own blindness and folly.  Though she knew that she was to blame, she was furious, not with herself, but with O’Hara.  He had insulted her, and she resolved bitterly that she would never forgive him.  Even now, whenever she was silent, she could still feel his kiss on her mouth, and the vividness of the sensation stung her into passionate anger.  She was no longer the reasonable and competent Gabriella, who had so successfully “managed her life”; she was primitive woman in the grip of primitive anger; and balance, moderation, restraint, had flown from her soul.  The very mystery of her feeling, its complexity, its suddenness, its remorselessness—­these emotions worked together to deepen the sense of insult, of injury, with which she burned.

“It is true, and you have no right to doubt it.  You have no right.”  She caught her breath sharply, and then went on with inexcusable harshness:  “Even if there hadn’t been any one else, I should never—­I could never in the world—­”