Madelon glanced at the little gold watch, curled round with a long gold chain, which the case contained, and continued to hold it out towards Lot.  “I’ve looked,” said she.  “Here, take it; I must go home.”

“Oh, Madelon, it’s for you.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Take it—­Madelon, won’t you have it?  I got it for you.”

“No, I don’t want it.  Shall I put it back in the drawer?”

“Don’t you think it’s a pretty watch?”

“Yes.  Shall I put it back?”

“You haven’t any watch, Madelon.”

“I don’t want one.”  Madelon closed the case impatiently, and turned away.

“Oh, Madelon, won’t you take it?” Lot begged, piteously.

“I told you no—­I do not care for it.”  Madelon put the case back in the desk drawer.  Then she drew her cloak together, and went to the door again.

“Oh,” said Lot Gordon, weakly, in his hoarse voice, “the hardest thing in the whole world for Love to bruise himself against is the tender heart of a woman, when ’tis not inclined his way.”

“Good-bye,” said Madelon, and shut the door behind her fiercely.  That last speech of Lot’s, which, like many of his speeches, seemed to her no human vernacular, added terror to her aversion of him.  “He’s more like a book than a man,” she had often thought, and the fancy seized her now that the great leather-bound book upon his knees, and all those leather-bound books against his walls, had somehow possessed him with an uncanny life of their own.

And she may have been in a measure right, for Lot Gordon, during his whole life, had dealt indirectly with human hearts through their translations in his beloved books rather than with the beating hearts of men and women around him.  Still, although he spoke like one who learns a language from books instead of the familiar converse of people, and his thoughts clothed themselves in images which those about him disdained and threw off as impeding their hard race of life, poor Lot Gordon’s heart beat in time with the hearts of his kind.  But that Madelon could not know because hers was so set against it.

She hurried out of the house and the yard, dreading again lest she should encounter Burr.  But her haste was of no avail, for he came straight down his opposite terraces, and met her when she reached the road.

She would have pushed past then, but he stood squarely before her.  “Madelon, can’t I speak with you a minute?” he pleaded.  Madelon saw, without seeming to look, that Burr’s handsome face was white as death and haggard.

“Are you sick?” she asked, suddenly.  “Why do you look so?  What is the matter with you?” and she put a half-bitter, half-anxiously compassionate weight upon the you.

“I believe I am going mad,” Burr groaned, with the quick grasp of a man at the pity of the woman he loves.  “Oh, Madelon!” He held out his hands towards her like a child, but she stood back from him, and looked straight at him with sharp questioning in her eyes.