"Please don't tease me," she begged, and turning away from him, she half hid her face in the furs.
"Speak out! I will at least know whether you have any idea of the dangerous game you are playing with yourself and me."
"Ah, Leo!" she murmured. "I don't want to think; I won't think. It is so sweet to be together. That is all I know, and all I care about."
"At first we were to repent," he scolded further, "and to do nothing else. We were to go in sackcloth and ashes and scourge our bodies and souls. And God knows I have carried out my part of the programme. My remorse has so lacerated and bruised me that I feel as if there wasn't an honest fibre left in me. I seem to myself so corrupt and rotten that when any one offers me his hand, I almost cry out, 'Don't defile yourself by touching me.' If that was the object of it all, then it has been attained. But is what we are doing now remorse? Tell me that, woman--isn't it, rather, fresh infamy?"
"I don't know," she repeated, sighing. "I only know that it is sweet."
"And you are satisfied?"
She nodded three times in blissful silence. Then she said, "You are here, and that is enough."
"But you don't ask what I have had to endure before I came. Can you conceive what it is for a man to cling wildly to the last straw of self-respect that he has left. I have spent whole nights tramping the woods; I have run till the soles of my feet bled; I have tried to tire myself to death so as not to come here. But I have come."
Like a hungry, helpless child, he put out his hands to her in beseeching appeal, and she drank in his words with burning eyes.
"My poor, poor boy," she said, in a low tone, and reaching up to him she caressed his feet.