“I can’t love—­I can only hate,” she said.

“But you do not hate me!” Rolfe repudiated so gross a fact.  His voice caught as in a sob.  “I, who love you, who have taught you!”

She dismissed this—­what he had taught her—­with a gesture which, though slight, was all-expressive.  He drew back from her.

“Shall I tell you who has planned and carried out this plot?” he cried.  “It is Ditmar.  He is the one, and he used Janes, the livery stable keeper, the politician who brought the dynamite to Hampton, as his tool.  Half an hour before Janes got to the station in Boston he was seen by a friend of ours talking to Ditmar in front of the Chippering offices, and Janes had the satchel with him then.  Ditmar walked to the corner with him.”

Janet, too, had risen.

“I don’t believe it,” she said.

“Ah, I thought you wouldn’t!  But we have the proof that dynamite was in the satchel, we’ve found the contractor from whom it was bought.  I was a fool—­I might have known that you loved Ditmar.”

“I hate him!” said Janet.

“It is the same thing,” said Rolfe.

She did not answer....  He watched her in silence as she put on her hat and coat and left the room.

The early dusk was gathering when she left the hall and made her way toward the city.  The huge bottle-shaped chimneys of the power plant injected heavy black smoke into the wet air.  In Faber Street the once brilliant signs above the “ten-foot” buildings seemed dulled, the telegraph poles starker, nakeder than ever, their wires scarcely discernible against the smeared sky.  The pedestrians were sombrely garbed, and went about in “rubbers”—­the most depressing of all articles worn by man.  Sodden piles of snow still hid the curb and gutters, but the pavements were trailed with mud that gleamed in the light from the shop windows.  And Janet, lingering unconsciously in front of that very emporium where Lisehad been incarcerated, the Bagatelle, stared at the finery displayed there, at the blue tulle dress that might be purchased, she read, for $22.99.  She found herself repeating, in meaningless, subdued tones, the words, “twenty-two ninety-nine.”  She even tried—­just to see if it were possible—­to concentrate her mind on that dress, on the fur muffs and tippets in the next window; to act as if this were just an ordinary, sad February afternoon, and she herself once more just an ordinary stenographer leading a monotonous, uneventful existence.  But she knew that this was not true, because, later on, she was going to do something—­to commit some act.  She didn’t know what this act would be.  Her head was hot, her temples throbbed....