“That is false!” he said passionately.  “You do compel!  Your eyes drag my very soul out of me—­your touch drives me into frenzy!  You temptress!  You force me to speak, though you know already what I have to say!  That I love you, love you!  And that you love me!  That your whole life leaps to mine as mine to yours!  You know all this; if I were stricken dumb, you could read it in my face, but you will have it spoken—­you will extort from me the whole secret of my madness!—­yes, for you to take a cruel joy in knowing that I am mad—­mad for the love of you!  And you cannot be too often or too thoroughly assured that your own passion finds its reflex in me!”

He paused, abruptly checked in his wild words by the sound of her low, sweet, chill laughter.  She withdrew her hands from his burning grasp.

“My dear friend,” she said lightly, “you really have a very excellent opinion of yourself—­excuse me for saying so!  ’My own passion!’ Do you actually suppose I have a ‘passion’ for you?” And rising from her chair, she drew up her slim supple figure to its full height and looked at him with an amused and airy scorn.  “You are totally mistaken!  No one man living can move me to love; I know all men too well!  Their natures are uniformly composed of the same mixture of cruelty, lust and selfishness; and forever and forever, through all the ages of the world, they use the greater part of their intellectual abilities in devising new ways to condone and conceal their vices.  You call me ’temptress’;—­why?  The temptation, if any there be, emanates from yourself and your own unbridled desires; I do nothing.  I am made as I am made; if my face or my form seems fair in your eyes, this is not my fault.  Your glance lights on me, as the hawk’s lights on coveted prey; but think you the prey loves the hawk in response?  It is the mistake all men make with all women,—­to judge them always as being of the same base material as themselves.  Some women there are who shame their womanhood; but the majority, as a rule, preserve their self-respect till taught by men to lose it.”

Gervase sprang up and faced her, his eyes flashing dangerously.

“Do not make any pretence with me!” he said half angrily.  “Never tell me you cannot love! ...”

“I have loved!” she interrupted him.  “As true women love,—­once, and only once.  It suffices; not for one lifetime, but many.  I loved; and gave myself ungrudgingly and trustingly to the man my soul worshipped.  I was betrayed, of course!—­it is the usual story—­quite old, quite commonplace!  I can tell it to you without so much as a blush of pain!  Since then I have not loved,—­I have hated; and I live but for one thing—­Revenge.”

Her face paled as she spoke, and a something vague, dark, spectral and terrible seemed to enfold her like a cloud where she stood.  Anon she smiled sweetly, and with a bewitching provocativeness.

“Your ‘passion,’ you see, my friend awakens rather a singular ‘reflex’ in me!—­not quite of the nature you imagined!”