“I might have told you long ago, but I wasn’t sure of your sympathy.”

“I want you to be sure of my sympathy in all things.”

“Ah, but your mind is between!” That phrase brought a shock to Dr. Blake.  At the only spiritualistic seance he had ever attended, a greasy affair in a hall bedroom, he had heard that very phrase.  A picture of this woman, so clean and windblown of mind and soul, caught like a trapped fly in the web of the unclean and corrupt—­it was that which quite whirled him off his feet.

“Between our hearts then, between our hearts!” he cried.  “Oh, Annette, I love you!” His voice came out of him low and distinct, but all the power in the world vibrated behind it.  “I have loved you always.  You’ve been with me everywhere I went, because I was looking for you.  I’ve seen a part of you in the best of every woman”—­he pulled himself up, for neither by look nor gesture did she respond—­“I’ve no right to be saying this—­”

“If you have not,” she answered, and a delicate blush ran over her skin, “no other man has!” She said it simply, but with a curious kind of pride.

He would have taken her hand on this, but the grave, direct gaze of her sapphirine eyes restrained him.  It was not the look of a woman who gives herself, but rather that of a woman who grieves for the ungivable.

“Ah,” she said, “if anyone’s to blame, it is I. I’ve brought it on myself!  I’ve been weak—­weak!”

“No,” he said, “I brought it on—­God brought it on—­but what does that matter?

“It’s here.  I can no more fight it than I can fight the sea.”

Now her head dropped forward and her hands, with that gracefully uncertain motion which was like flower-stalks swayed by a breeze, had covered her face.

“I can’t speak if I look at you,” she said, “and I must before you go further—­I must tell you all about myself so that you will understand.”

The confidence, long sought, was coming, he thought; and he thought also how little he cared for it now that he was pursuing a greater thing.

“You know so little about me that I must begin far back—­you don’t even know about my aunt—­”

“I know something—­what you’ve said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain House told me.  She’s Mrs. Paula Markham—­” his mind went on, “the great fakir of the spook doctors,” but his lips stifled the phrase and said after a pause, “the great medium.”

“I don’t like to hear her called that,” said Annette.  “In spite of what I’m going to tell you, I never saw but once the thing they call a medium.  That was years ago—­but the horrible sacrilege of it has never left me.  She had a part of truth, and she was desecrating it by guesses and catch words—­selling it for money!  Aunt Paula is broader than I.  ‘It’s part of the truth,’ she said, ’that woman is desecrating the work, but she’s serving in her way.’  I suppose so—­but since then I’ve never liked to hear Aunt Paula called a medium.”