'Or else you don't feel them at all.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well—Paul,' he said reluctantly.
'You have never got over that, have you?'
'Exactly!' he exclaimed. 'It seems to you extraordinary that I should still remember Paul, or that his death should have made any impression upon me. I ought to hate you for your indifference. Sometimes I have come very near to hating you. But now—perhaps my mind is getting broader—I blame you for nothing because I believe you are simply not capable of understanding. But evidently you can't explain yourself. I love you!' he said, 'I love you!'
He knew that her own inability to explain herself—her unself-consciousness—had done much to strengthen his new theories. The flower does not know why or how it blossoms....
On the day that he told her, with many misgivings, that Kato was coming to Aphros, she uttered no word of anger, but wept despairingly, at first without speaking, then with short, reiterated sentences that wrung his heart for all their unreason,—
'We were alone. I was happy as never in my life. I had you utterly. We were alone. Alone! Alone!'
'We will tell Kato the truth,' he soothed her; 'she will leave us alone still.'
But it was not in her nature to cling to straws of comfort. For her, the sunshine had been unutterably radiant; and for her it was now proportionately blackened out.