“Ah, yes!” he scoffed, “Lichfield would have made a fitting home for her.  She would have been very happy here, shut off from the world with us,—­with us, whose forefathers have married and intermarried with one another until the stock is worthless, and impotent for any further achievement.  For here, you know, we have the best blood in America, and —­for utilitarian purposes—­that means the worst blood.  Ah, we may prate of our superiority to the rest of the world,—­and God knows, we do!—­but, at bottom, we are worthless.  We are worn out, I tell you! we are effete and stunted in brain and will-power, and the very desire of life is gone out of us!  We are contented simply to exist in Lichfield.  And she—­”

He paused, and a new, fierce light came into his eyes.  “She was so beautiful!” he said, half-angrily, between clenched teeth.

“You are just like the rest of them, Olaf,” she lamented, with a hint of real sadness.  “You imagine you are in love with a girl because you happen to like the color of her eyes, or because there is a curve about her lips that appeals to you.  That isn’t love, Olaf, as we women understand it.  Ah, no, a girl’s love for a man doesn’t depend altogether upon his fitness to be used as an advertisement for somebody’s ready-made clothing.”

“You fancy you know what you are talking about,” said Rudolph Musgrave, “but you don’t.  You don’t realize, you see, how beautiful she—­was.”

And this time, he nearly tripped upon the tense, for her hand was on his arm, and, in consequence, a series of warm, delicious little shivers was running about his body in a fashion highly favorable to extreme perturbation of mind.

“You should have told her, Olaf,” she said, wistfully.  “Oh, Olaf, Olaf, why didn’t you tell her?”

She did not know, of course, how she was tempting him; she did not know, of course, how her least touch seemed to waken every pulse in his body to an aching throb, and set hope and fear a-drumming in his breast.  Obviously, she did not know; and it angered him that she did not.

“She would have laughed at me,” he said, with a snarl; “how she would have laughed!”

“She wouldn’t have laughed, Olaf.”  And, indeed, she did not look as if she would.

“But much you know of her!” said Rudolph Musgrave, morosely.  “She was just like the rest of them, I tell you!  She knew how to stare a man out of countenance with big purple eyes that were like violets with the dew on them, and keep her paltry pink-and-white baby face all pensive and sober, till the poor devil went stark, staring mad, and would have pawned his very soul to tell her that he loved her!  She knew!  She did it on purpose.  She would look pensive just to make an ass of you!  She—­”

And here the colonel set his teeth for a moment, and resolutely drew back from the abyss.