"And I've found a place to live. Pat and Molly; will take care of things for you here."
"Dorothy! You don't MEAN this? You're not going to break off?"
"I shan't see you again--except as we may meet by accident."
"Do you realize what you're saying means to me?" he cried. "Don't you know how I love you?" He advanced toward her. She stood and waited passively, looking at him. "Dorothy--my love--do you want to kill me?"
"When are you to be married?" she asked quietly.
"You are playing with me!" he cried. "You are tormenting me. What have I ever done that you should treat me this way?" He caught her unresisting hands and kissed them. "Dear--my dear--don't you care for me at all?"
"No," she said placidly. "I've always told you so."
He seized her in his arms, kissed her with a frenzy that was savage, ferocious. "You will drive me mad.
You HAVE driven me mad!" he muttered. And he added, unconscious that he was speaking his thoughts, so distracted was he: "You MUST love me--you MUST! No woman has ever resisted me. You cannot."
She drew herself away from him, stood before him like snow, like ice. "One thing I have never told you.
I'll tell you now," she said deliberately. "I despise you."
He fell back a step and the chill of her coldness seemed to be freezing the blood in his veins.
"I've always despised you," she went on, and he shivered before that contemptuous word--it seemed only the more contemptuous for her calmness. "Sometimes I've despised you thoroughly--again only a little--but always that feeling."
For a moment he thought she had at last stung his pride into the semblance of haughtiness. He was able to look at her with mocking eyes and to say, "I congratulate you on your cleverness in concealing your feelings."
"It wasn't my cleverness," she said wearily. "It was your blindness. I never deceived you."
"No, you never have," he replied sincerely.
"Perhaps I deserve to be despised. Again, perhaps if you knew the world--the one I live in--better, you'd think less harshly of me."
"I don't think harshly of you. How could I--after all you did for my father?"
"Dorothy, if you'll stay here and study for the stage--or anything you choose--I promise you I'll never speak of my feeling for you--or show it in any way--unless you yourself give me leave."
She smiled with childlike pathos. "You ought not to tempt me. Do you want me to keep on despising you? Can't you ever be fair with me?"
The sad, frank gentleness of the appeal swung his unhinged mind to the other extreme--from the savagery of passion to a frenzy of remorse. "Fair to YOU?
No," he cried, "because I love you. Oh, I'm ashamed --bitterly ashamed. I'm capable of any baseness to get you. You're right. You can't trust me. In going you're saving me from myself." He hesitated, stared wildly, appalled at the words that were fighting for utterance--the words about marriage--about marrying her! He said hoarsely: "I am mad--mad! I don't know what I'm saying. Good-by-- For God's sake, don't think the worst of me, Dorothy. Good-by. I WILL be a man again--I will!"
And he wrung her hand and, talking incoherently, he rushed from the room and from the house.
