She turned upon him savagely, and it seemed as though a storm of passion would break upon him; but all at once she changed, came up close to him, and looked him steadily in the eyes.

“I do not think I trust you,” she said, quite quietly.

His eyes could not meet hers fairly.  He felt them shrinking from her inquisition.  “You have always trusted me till now.  What has happened?” he asked, apprehensively and with husky voice.

“Nothing has happened,” she replied in a low, steady voice.  “Nothing.  But I seem to realize you to-night.  It came to me suddenly, at dinner, as I listened to you, as I saw you talk—­I had never before seen you in surroundings like these.  But I realized you then:  I had a revelation.  You need not ask me what it was.  I do not know quite.  I cannot tell.  It is all vague, but it is startling, and it has gone through my heart like a knife.  I tell you this, and I tell you quite calmly, that if you prove to be what, for the first time, I have a vision you are, I shall never look upon your face again if I can help it.  If I come to know that you are false in nature and in act, that all you have said to me is not true, that you have degraded me—­Oh,” she fiercely added, breaking off and speaking with infinite anger and scorn—­“it was only love, honest and true, however mistaken, which could make what has been between us endurable in my eyes!  What I have thought was true love, and its true passion, helped me to forget the degradation and the secret shame—­only the absolute honesty of that love could make me forget.  But suppose I find it only imitation; suppose I see that it is only selfishness, only horrible, ugly self-indulgence; suppose you are a man who plays with a human soul!  If I find that to be so, I tell you I shall hate you; and I shall hate myself; but I shall hate you more—­a thousand times more.”

She paused with agony and appealing, with confusion and vague horror in her face.  Her look was direct and absorbing, her eyes like wells of sullen fire.

“Al’mah,” he replied with fluttered eagerness, “let us talk of this later—­not now—­later.  I will answer anything—­everything.  I can and I will prove to you that this is only a mad idea of yours, that—­”

“No, no, no, not mad,” she interrupted.  “There is no madness in it.  I had a premonition before I came.  It was like a cloud on my soul.  It left me when we met here, when I heard your voice again; and for a moment I was happy.  That was why I sang before dinner that song of Lassen’s, ‘Thine Eyes So Blue and Tender.’  But it has come back.  Something deep within me says, ‘He is not true.’  Something whispers, ’He is false by nature; it is not in him to be true to anything or anybody.’”

He made an effort to carry off the situation lightly.  With a great sense of humour, she had also an infinite capacity for taking things seriously—­with an almost sensational gravity.  Yet she had always responded to his cheerful raillery when he had declined to be tragical.  He essayed the old way now.