“Of course, that would make you hate me.  It must make anyone hate me if it’s true.”

There was a moment’s silence and he heard her laugh.  It was a sound of a single note and it was neither a laugh of amusement nor of ridicule.  If there was any betrayal of laughing at the expense of someone, the someone was evidently herself, and Paul was not sure it was a laugh after all.  Possibly it was a single sob or half-sob and half-laugh.  But she went on in a voice flattened by weariness.

“Life deals in paradoxes.  Possibly that very thing might make one love you.”

Paul stood in the small room, feeling himself very small and contemptible.  The face of Loraine rose before his memory, beautiful and petulant, appealing and regal, features of ivory with poppy-like lips, dominated by dusky eyes and night-black hair.

Suddenly she seemed responsible for all his uncertainties.  He saw her just then as a Circe.  He was a man, swung to an ebb and flow of mood by influences outwardly as nebulous as moon-mists.  Just now the influence of Loraine Haswell was at ebb-tide.  Tomorrow it might run again to flood, but Paul Burton obeyed the prompting of the present.

With a low exclamation that was wordless and a face tense and white, he was at the girl’s side and his arms were again about her.  She shook her head and tried to draw away, but he only held her the more closely until she raised her face and said patiently, “I’m very tired, don’t make me fight both myself and you.”

The musician shook his head and talked fast.  “You said when I kissed you that you thought it meant something very different.  You could have meant only that you thought I loved you.  But that was not all.  Thinking that I loved you would have meant nothing to you if you hadn’t loved me—­if you didn’t love me now.  You do.  You have just said, ’Don’t make me fight myself.’  There would be no fight with yourself—­if you didn’t love me.”

He paused and his arms held her very close, as he saw her turn away her face and make an effort to release herself, but in the eyes that she averted he read the cost of the effort.

“Please let me go.”  The words came faintly.

“Not until you answer me.  I love you, Marcia.  This time it means all that you thought it meant before.  I love you.”

Her eyes came around again and intently studied his own, then the voice spoke in low tone: 

“No.  You think you do—­but it’s only impulse.”

“I love you,” he insisted, “and you love me.  Your pupils confess it.  Why deny it with your lips?  You love me.”

She gently disengaged herself and sat again on the lounge.

“Very well,” she told him as she looked at him with an honesty of expression under which his own gaze fell discomforted, “suppose I do confess it, what then?  I hadn’t ever meant to confess it, but perhaps it’s better that we understand things.  We mustn’t drift blindly.  Just now, Paul, when you declared your love you thought you meant it.  For the fleeting time it took to say it you did mean it.  If you saw her tomorrow you would tell her the same things, and you’d believe yourself honest.  If I loved you beyond all hope of forgetting you, it would only prove that we had both made a mistake.  We mustn’t go on with it.”