The following morning as she was kneeling in a corner of the room by the letter files, one of which she had placed on the floor, she recognized his step in the outer office, heard him pause to joke with young Caldwell, and needed not the visual proof—­when after a moment he halted on the threshold—­of the fact that his usual, buoyant spirits were restored.  He held a cigar in his hand, and in his eyes was the eager look with which she had become familiar, which indeed she had learned to anticipate as they swept the room in search of her.  And when they fell on her he closed the door and came forward impetuously.  But her exclamation caused him to halt in bewilderment.

“Don’t touch me!” she said.

And he stammered out, as he stood over her:—­“What’s the matter?”

“Everything.  You don’t love me—­I was a fool to believe you did.”

“Don’t love you!” he repeated.  “My God, what’s the trouble now?  What have I done?”

“Oh, it’s nothing you’ve done, it’s what you haven’t done, it’s what you can’t do.  You don’t really care for me—­all you care for is this mill —­when anything happens here you don’t know I’m alive.”

He stared at her, and then an expression of comprehension, of intense desire grew in his eyes; and his laugh, as he flung his cigar out of the open window and bent down to seize her, was almost brutal.  She fought him, she tried to hurt him, and suddenly, convulsively pressed herself to him.

“You little tigress!” he said, as he held her.  “You were jealous—­were you—­jealous of the mill?” And he laughed again.  “I’d like to see you with something really to be jealous about.  So you love me like that, do you?”

She could feel his heart beating against her.

“I won’t be neglected,” she told him tensely.  “I want all of you—­if I can’t have all of you, I don’t want any.  Do you understand?”

“Do I understand?  Well, I guess I do.”

“You didn’t yesterday,” she reproached him, somewhat dazed by the swiftness of her submission, and feeling still the traces of a lingering resentment.  She had not intended to surrender.  “You forgot all about me, you didn’t know I was here, much less that I was hurt.  Oh, I was hurt!  And you—­I can tell at once when anything’s wrong with you—­I know without your saying it.”

He was amazed, he might indeed have been troubled and even alarmed by this passion he had aroused had his own passion not been at the flood.  And as he wiped away her tears with his handkerchief he could scarcely believe his senses that this was the woman whose resistance had demanded all his force to overcome.  Indeed, although he recognized the symptoms she betrayed as feminine, as having been registered—­though feebly compared to this! by incidents in his past, precisely his difficulty seemed to be in identifying this complex and galvanic being as a woman, not as something almost fearful in her significance, outside the bounds of experience....