“You don’t understand, you don’t know how—­how wonderful you are.  You make me crazy.  I love you, I want you as I’ve never wanted any woman before—­in a different way.  I can’t explain it.  I’ve got so that I can’t live without you.”  He flung his arm toward the lights of the mills.  “That—­that used to be everything to me, I lived for it.  I don’t say I’ve been a saint—­but I never really cared anything about any woman until I knew you, until that day I went through the office and saw you what you were.  You don’t understand, I tell you.  I’m sorry for what I did to-day because it offended you—­but you drove me to it.  Most of the time you seem cold, you’re like an iceberg, you make me think you hate me, and then all of a sudden you’ll be kind, as you were the other night, as you seemed this afternoon—­you make me think I’ve got a chance, and then, when you came near me, when you touched my hand—­why, I didn’t know what I was doing.  I just had to have you.  A man like me can’t stand it.”

“Then I’d better go away,” she said.  “I ought to have gone long ago.”

“Why?” he cried.  “Why?  What’s your reason?  Why do you want to ruin my life?  You’ve—­you’ve woven yourself into it—­you’re a part of it.  I never knew what it was to care for a woman before, I tell you.  There’s that mill,” he repeated, naively.  “I’ve made it the best mill in the country, I’ve got the biggest order that ever came to any mill—­if you went away I wouldn’t care a continental about it.  If you went away I wouldn’t have any ambition left.  Because you’re a part of it, don’t you see?  You—­you sort of stand for it now, in my mind.  I’m not literary, I can’t express what I’d like to say, but sometimes I used to think of that mill as a woman—­and now you’ve come along—­” Ditmar stopped, for lack of adequate eloquence.

She smiled in the darkness at his boyish fervour,—­one of the aspects of the successful Ditmar, the Ditmar of great affairs, that appealed to her most strongly.  She was softened, touched; she felt, too, a responsive thrill to such a desire as his.  Yet she did not reply.  She could not.  She was learning that emotion is never simple.  And some inhibition, the identity of which was temporarily obscured still persisted, pervading her consciousness....

They were crossing the bridge at Stanley Street, now deserted, and by common consent they paused in the middle of it, leaning on the rail.  The hideous chocolate factory on the point was concealed by the night,—­only the lights were there, trembling on the surface of the river.  Against the flushed sky above the city were silhouetted the high chimneys of the power plant.  Ditmar’s shoulder touched hers.  He was still pleading, but she seemed rather to be listening to the symphony of the unseen waters falling over the dam.  His words were like that, suggestive of a torrent into which she longed to fling herself, yet refrained, without knowing why.  Her hands tightened on the rail; suddenly she let it