“That goes out of the way as soon as I can get something to cover the spot,” he remarked, adding gayly, “Symonds says he will finish his portrait of me next week, and I’ll hang it there until you claim it.”

Her face had clouded, and without looking at him she moved toward the door.  “Are you really glad that I came?” she asked abruptly, turning upon the threshold.

“Glad!  My darling girl, I’m simply overjoyed.  You gave me the most miserable morning of my life.”

It was the truth—­he knew it for the truth while he uttered it, but, in his heart of hearts, he felt without confessing it to himself, that his love had dropped back from that divine height beyond which mere human impulse becomes ideal passion.

CHAPTER IX

OF THE FEAR IN LOVE

When Laura reached the sidewalk she was seized by one of those reactions of feeling which are possible only in periods of unnatural and overstrained excitement.

“I would rather you didn’t come with me now,” she said, “I’ve promised Gerty to go to her this afternoon, and I’d honestly rather go alone.”

“But I’ve seen nothing of you at all,” he urged, “put Gerty aside—­she won’t mind.  If she does, tell her I made you do it.”

She shook her head, shrinking slightly away from him in the street.  “It isn’t that, but I want to be alone—­to think.  Come this evening and I’ll be quite myself again.  Only just now I—­I can’t talk.”

In the end he had yielded, overborne by so unusual a spirit of opposition; and with a reproachful good-bye he had returned to his rooms, while she went slowly up the street in the pale autumn sunshine.

The impulse in which she had gone to him had utterly died down; and she asked herself, with a curiosity that was almost indifferent, why, since the reconciliation she had longed for was now complete, she should feel only melancholy where she had expected to find happiness?  Kemper had never been more impassioned, had never shown himself to be more thoroughly the lover—­yet in some way she admitted, it had all been different from the deeper reunion she had hoped for; there had come to her even while she lay in his arms that strange, though familiar sense of unreality in her own emotion; and beneath the touch of his hands she had felt herself to be separated from him by the space of a whole inner world.  Though she appeared to have got everything, she realised, with a pang of resentment directed against herself, that she had wanted a great deal more than he had had the power to bestow.  Could it be that the thing she had missed was that finer sympathy of spirit without which all human passion is but the withered husk where the flower has never bloomed?

“Is it true that I must be forever content with the mere gesture of love?” she thought.  “Is it true that I shall never reach his soul, which is surely there if I could but find it?  Has it eluded me, after all, only because I did not know the way?”