In your heart of hearts you admit that a woman like you is not kissed for the first and last time by a man like me. Suppose I kissed you now? I should awaken something in you as yet half asleep. You're young and pulsing with life, and there are--thank Heaven!--few layers of that damnable young-girl shyness over you. The world would call you primitive, I suppose.""But I don't----" "Oh, Lord, you must see it's all or nothing! You surely understand that after I had left you you would not go against your morality, perhaps, but you would adjust it, in spite of yourself, to meet your desires! I cannot--safely--kiss you.""But you are going away for good!" "For good! Child, do you think my going will be your safeguard? If you wanted me so much that you came to think it was right and good to want me, wouldn't you find me, send for me, call for me? And I should come. God! I can see the look in your eyes now, when the want had been satisfied, and you could not drug your creed any more."Her breath came in a long sigh. Then she tried to speak; tried again."It is so, isn't it?" he asked. She nodded. Speech was too difficult. With the movement a strand of the corn-gold hair came tumbling down the side of her face."Then, that being the case," said the man, with infinite gentleness, his eyes on the little, tumbling lock, "I shall not attempt so much as to touch your hand before you leave the room."At the door she turned. "Tell me once again," she said. "You _want_ to kiss me?" He gripped the arms of his chair; from where she stood, she could see the veins standing out on his hands."I want to kiss you," he said fiercely. "I want to kiss you. If there were any way of cutting off to-morrow--all the to-morrows--with the danger they hold for us--I would kiss you. I would kiss you, and kiss you, and kiss you!"
IIWhere her feet took her during the thousand, thousand years that was his going she could never afterwards say; but she found herself at last at the top of the great building, at an open window, leaning out, with the rain beating into her eyes. Far below her the lights wavered and later she remembered that echoes of a far-off tumult had reached her as she sat. But her ears held only the memory of a man's footsteps--the eager tread that had never lingered so much as a second's space on its way to her; that had often stumbled slightly on the threshold of her presence; that she had heard and welcomed in her dreams; that would not come again.The raindrops lay like tears upon her face. She brushed them aside, and, rising, put up her hands to feel the wet lying heavy on her hair. The coldness of her limbs surprised her faintly. Downstairs she went again, the echoes mocking every step. She closed the door of the room behind her and idly cleared a scrap of paper from a 

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