“I can understand all—but one thing,” she went on after a while. “Why have you brought me to this—here—at night alone with you—to tell me this—to make me—me—oh, change in my feelings—to you? Oh, must I say it?” she cried—“tell you the truth—that—that—now since I see you as you are—I—I,—I am willing to go!”
“Hush, Helen, my child, my God—don't crush me—don't—listen, child—listen! I am a villain—a doubly-dyed, infamous one—when you hear”—
She shook her head and put one of her pretty hands over his mouth.
“Let me tell you all, first. Let me finish. After all this, why have you brought me here to tell me this, when all you had to do was to keep silent a few more hours—take me on to the station, as you said—and—and—”
“I will tell you,” he said gently. “Yes, you have asked the question needed to be explained. Now hear from my own lips my infamy—not all of it, God knows—that would take the night; but this peculiar part of it. Do you know why I love to stroke your hair, why I love to touch it, to touch you, to look into your eyes; why I should love, next to one thing of all earth, to take you in my arms and smother you—kill you with kisses—your hair, your eyes, your mouth?”
She hid her face, crimson.
“Did no one tell you, ever tell you—how much you look like your cousin”—he stopped—he could not say the word, but she guessed. White with shame, she sprang up from him, startled, hurt. Her heart tightened into a painful thing which pricked her.
“Then—then—it is not I—but my Cousin Alice—oh—I—yes—I did hear—I should have known”—it came from her slowly and with a quivering tremor.
He seized her hands and drew her back down by him on the sofa.
“When I started into this with you I was dead—dead. My soul was withered within me. All women were my playthings—all but one. She was my Queen—my wife that was to be. I was dead, my God—how dead I was! I now see with a clearness that is killing me; a clearness as of one waking from sleep and feeling, in the first wave of conscience, that inconceivable tenderness which hurts so—hurts because it is tender and before the old hard consciousness of material things come again to toughen. How dead I was, you may know when I say that all this web now around you—from your entrance into the mill till now—here to-night—in my power—body and soul—that it was all to gratify this dead sea fruit of my soul, this thing in me I cannot understand, making me conquer women all my life for—oh, as a lion would, to kill, though not hungry, and then lie by them, dying, and watch them,—dead! Then this same God—if any there be—He who you say put more on you than you could bear—He struck me, as, well—no—He did not strike—but ground me, ground me into dust—took her out of my life and then laid my soul before me so naked that the very sunlight scorches it. What was it the old preacher said—that 'touch of God' business? 'Touch—'” he laughed, “not touch, but blow, I say—a blow that ground me into star-dust and flung me into space, my heart a burning comet and my soul the tail of it, dissolving before my very eyes. What then can I, a lion, dying, care for the doe that crosses my path? The beautiful doe, beautiful even as you are. Do you understand me, child?”