"It repays you—I see that," he said. "And so I am repaid for bringing you."
"Yes, it is very beautiful," she answered, slowly; "but I am not sure that I am obliged to you for bringing me here. It produces in me feelings that I do not like."
"What kind of feelings?" inquired Rathborne, curiously.
She swept him with a quick glance from under her half-drooped eyelids, and he had again the impression that it conveyed something of contempt.
"If I could define them," she said, "I doubt if you would be able to understand them. I am certain that you have never felt anything of the kind."
"Why should you be certain of that?" he asked, a little irritated as well by her tone as by her glance. "You do not surely think that you have gauged all my possibilities of feeling."
"I have made no attempt to do so," she said, indifferently. "Why should I? But one receives some impressions instinctively."
"And you think, perhaps, that I have no feeling," he replied quickly; "that I am cold and hard and selfish, and altogether a calculating machine. But you are mistaken. I was all that once—I frankly confess it,—but since I have known you, I have changed. I have learned what it is to feel in the deepest manner."
There was a short silence. Marion's heart gave a great bound and then seemed to stand still. A fear which she had striven to put away was now a horrible certainty. She had played with fire, and the moment of scorching was come—come to desecrate a place which she had felt to be a sanctuary filled with the consciousness of God. Her first impulse was to turn and go away without a word; her next, to utter words as scornful as her mood.
"If I am mistaken, so are you, Mr. Rathborne," she said,—"exceedingly mistaken in imagining that I have given any thought to your feelings, or that I am in the faintest degree interested in them."