But the man only sighed deeply as he replied:  “I thought your dancing lessons were over.  I hoped I was no longer to spend my evenings alone.  Alone!  Looking round at the things that are yours, and among which I feel so out of place, except when you are there to make me forget.  God!  What damnable evenings I’ve spent there—­feeling as if you were slipping further and further out of my life—­as if you were gone, and I had only the clothes you had worn, an odor about me somewhere to convince me that I had not dreamed you!  Sometimes that faint, indistinct, evasive scent of you in the room has almost driven me out of my head.  I wonder I haven’t killed you before now—­to be sure of you!  I’m afraid of Hell, I suppose, or I should have.”

The woman did not look at all alarmed.  Indeed there was a light in her amber eyes that spoke of a kind of gratification in stirring this young giant like that—­this huge fellow that could so easily crush her—­but did not!  She knew better why than he did—­but she said nothing.

With his eyes still fixed on space—­after a pause—­he went on:  “I was fool enough to believe that that was all over, at last, that you had danced to your heart’s content, and that we were to begin the old life—­the life before that nonsense—­over again.  You were like my old Dora all day yesterday!  The Dora I loved and courted and married back there in the woods.  But I might have known it wasn’t finished by the ache I had here,” and he struck himself a blow over the heart with his clenched fist, “when I waked this morning, and by the weight I’ve carried here all day.”  And he drew a deep breath like one in pain.

The woman looked about as if apprehensive that even his passionate undertone might have attracted attention, but only a man by the radiator seemed to have noticed, and he had the air of being not quite sober enough to understand.

There was a long pause.

The woman glanced nervously at the clock.

The man was again staring over her head.

It was quarter to six.  Her precious minutes were flying.  She must be rid of him!

“See here, Zeke, dear,” she said, in desperation, speaking very rapidly under her breath—­no fear but he would hear—­“the truth is, that I’m not a bit better satisfied with our sordid kind of life than I was a year ago, when we first discussed it.  I’m awfully sorry!  You know that.  But I can’t change—­and there is the whole truth!  It’s not your fault in one way—­and yet in one way it is.  God knows you have done everything you could, and more some ways than you ought.  But, unluckily for you, gratifying me was not the way to mend the situation for yourself.  It is cruel—­but it is the truth!  If a man wants to keep a woman of my disposition attached to him, he’d do far better to beat her than over-educate her, and teach her all the beauties of freedom.  He should keep her ignorant, rather than cultivate her imagination,