“Go on.  Tell me.”

“I’ve been wondering whether your husband ought to have won his case,” said Dion, in a low voice.

“Is that all?” she said, very simply and without any emotion.

“All?”

“Yes.  Do you suppose, when I gave myself to you, I didn’t realize that my doing it was certain to make you doubt my virtue?  Dion, you don’t know how boyish you still are.  You will always be in some ways a boy.  I knew you would doubt me after all that had happened.  But what is the good of asking questions of a women whom you doubt?  If I am what you suspect, of course I shall tell lies.  If I am not, what is the good of my telling you the truth?  What is to make you believe it?”

He was silent.  She moved slightly and he felt her thin body against his side.  What sort of weapon was she?  That was the great question for him.  Since his struggle in the forest of Defetgamm he had come to the resolve to strike fierce and reiterated blows on that disabling and surely contemptible love of his, that love which had confronted him like a specter when he was in the pavilion with Jimmy.  He was resolved at last upon assassination, and he wanted a weapon that could slay, not a weapon that would bend, or perhaps break, in his hand.

“I don’t want to believe I am only one among many,” he said at last.

The sound of his voice gave her the cue to his inmost feeling.  She had been puzzled in the forest, she had been half afraid, seeing that he had arrived at an acute emotional crisis and not understanding what had brought him to it.  She did not understand that now, but she knew that he was asking from her more than he had ever asked before.  He had been cast out and now he was knocking hard on her door.  He was knocking, but lingering remnants of the influence of the woman who had colored his former life hung about him like torn rags, and his hands instinctively felt for them, pulled at them, to cover his nakedness.  Still, while he knocked, he looked back to the other life.  Nevertheless—­she knew this with all there was of woman in her—­he wanted from her all that the good woman had never given to him, was incapable of giving to him or to any one.  He wanted from her, perhaps, powers of the body which would suffice finally for the killing of those powers of the soul by which he was now tormented ceaselessly.  The sound of his voice demanded from her something no other man had ever demanded from her, the slaughter in him of what he had lived by through all his years.  Nevertheless he was still looking back to all the old purities, was still trying to hear all the old voices.  He required of her, as it were, that she should be good in her evil, gentle while she destroyed.  Well, she would even be that.  A rare smile curved her thin lips, but he did not see it.

“Suppose I told you that you were one of many?” she said.  “Would you give it all up?”

“I don’t know.  Am I?”