“You must believe whatever your feeling for me dictates,” he retorted.  “I shall not stoop to meet a charge of which I am still ignorant—­I have loved you,” he added, “more than I have ever loved any man or woman in my life.”

“You have never loved me—­you do not love me now,” she responded coolly.

She had not meant to speak the words; they held no particular meaning for her ears; and yet they had no sooner passed her lips than she had a strange impression that they remained like detached, living things in the space between them.  Why she had spoken as she had done, she could not tell, nor why she had really cared so little at the instant when she had uttered her passionate reproach.  Then she remembered a wooden figure she had once seen on the stage—­a figure that walked and moved its arms and uttered sounds which resembled a human voice—­and it seemed to her that she, herself, was this figure and that her gestures and the words she spoke were the result of the hidden automaton within her.

She saw him pass to the door, look back once, and then leave the room with his rapid step, and while her eyes followed him, she felt that the man who had just gone from her with that angry glance was a different individual from the man whom she still loved and for whom she would presently suffer an agony of longing.  Then as the sound of the hall door closing sharply fell on her ears, she passed instantly from the deadening lethargy of her senses into a vivid realisation of the thing which had just happened—­of the meaning of the words which she had spoken and of the look which he had thrown back at her as he went.  A passion of despair rose in her throat, struggling for release until it became a physical torture, and she cried out in her loneliness that nothing mattered—­neither truth nor falsehood—­so long as she could be brought again face to face with his actual presence.

But—­if she had only known the truth!—­Kemper had never desired her so ardently as in the hour when he told himself that, by his own fault, he had lost her forever; she had never shown herself so worthy to be won as when she had looked down upon him from the remoteness of her disdain.  Like many men of flexible morality, he entertained a profound respect for any rigid ethical standard; and had Laura maintained her unyielding attitude, he would probably have suffered a hopeless passion for her to the end of his embittered but still elastic experience.  Though he was hardly aware of it, the only virtues he could perfectly appreciate were the ones which usually present themselves in a masculine shape—­courage, honour, fair play among men and chivalry to women; and it seemed to him that Laura, in exacting his entire fidelity, was acting upon an essentially masculine prerogative.  The more she demanded, the more, unconsciously to himself, he felt that he was ready to surrender—­and he cursed now the intervention of Madame Alta with a vehemence he would never have felt had the course of his love flowed on smoothly in spite of his relapses.