“I won’t say that,” he answered.  “It has been a great deal to me, but isn’t it wiser to make all in the past tense now?  What have we to gain?”

She tried to smile.  “Nothing, I suppose.”  Then breaking out fiercely:  “You are a strange man!  You are like the creature Margrave, in Bulwer’s hard ‘Strange Story,’ with mind and body, but with no soul nor sympathy.”

The man in his turn became almost angry.  He spoke more grimly: 

“You are not just!  Have I broken any pledge or violated any promise, even an implied one?  Have we not known each other on even terms?  It was but a pact for mutual enjoyment until either should be weary.  We have no illusions.  You a Lilith of the red earth, not of Adam; you a woman sweet and passionate and kind, but soulless, too, and fickle; and I a trained man, made as soulless by experience, we met and agreed, without words, to break a lance in a flirtation.  And that both lances were splintered doesn’t matter now.  We had joy in the encounter, didn’t we, and more after each surrendered captive?  But it has been only mimic warfare.  It has not been the real thing.”

“Evidently not—­to you!  Unfortunately one forgets sometimes, and then one is endangered.”

He was troubled.  He rose and came to her side, and put his hand upon her head, the usually proudly carried head of a handsome woman, now bowed in the effort to hide a face which told too much.  “It is all unfortunate.  It is unfortunate that we met, if you care as you profess.  I had counted us as equal; that you were, with me, caring for the day and never for the morrow, so far as we two were concerned.”

She raised her face.  “Do you love me?” she said.

He hesitated.  “I am fond of you.”

“Do you love me?”

“In the sense that I suppose you mean, no.”

She did not look at him for a moment; then she rose swiftly to her feet and looked squarely in his face.

“Is there some one else?”

He did not answer.

“Is there some one else?”

“Yes.”

“Then it is unfortunate, as you say—­and for her.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I will not endure to be dropped by you as a child drops a toy of which it is weary.  I mean that I will not surrender you to some new creature who has intervened!  What does it matter that there has been no pledge between us?  You have made me love you!  You know it!  The very being to each other what you and I have been is a pledge for the future.  Oh, Grant!”

The woman’s eyes were full of tears, and her voice was a moan.  The man was suffering both shame and agony.  He knew that, careless as he had been, the relations had grown to imply a permanency.  The woman was at least justified in her claims that words are not always necessary to a contract.  What could he do?  Then came the thought of Jean.  One hair of her brown head was more to him than this woman, or any other woman he had ever known.  He was decided.