He was silent.
"I suppose you think I find this heaven?"
At last he answered. He came across to her; he stood looking at her with his strange new expression of inscrutability.
"Oh, Maxine!" he said, "why must you misjudge me? Little Maxine, who could be taken in my arms this minute and carried away to my castle, like a princess of long ago—but who would break her heart over the bondage! I haven't much, dear one, to justify my existence—but the gods have given me intuition. I do not think you are in heaven."
He waited a moment, while in the sky above them the stars looked down impartially upon the white domes of the church and the beacons of pleasure in the city below.
"Maxine! Shall I say the things for you that you want to say?"
She bent her head.
"Well, first of all, God help us, the world is a terrible tangle; and then you have a strange soul that has never yet half revealed itself. You sent me away from you because you feared love; you called me back because you feared your fear—"
"No! No! You are reasoning now, not justifying! You are entrapping me!"
"Am I?"