She quickly shifted her eyes, in which her dislike was showing,
shifted them before he could possibly have seen. And she tried in
vain to force past her lips the words which she believed to be the
truth, the words his pathetic, powerful face told her would end
everything. Yes, she knew he would not marry her if she told him
the truth about her feelings.

"Do you mean that?" he repeated, stern and sharp, yet sad,
wistfully sad, too.

"I don't know what I mean," she cried, desperately afraid of him,
afraid of the visions the idea of not marrying him conjured. "I
don't know what I mean," she repeated. "You fill me with a kind
of--of--horror. You draw me into your grasp in spite of myself--
like a whirlpool--and rouse all my instinct to try and save
myself. Sometimes that desire becomes a positive frenzy."

He laughed complacently. "That is love," said he.

She did not resent his tone or dispute his verdict externally. "If
it is love," replied she evenly, "then never did love wear so
strange, so dreadful a disguise."

He laid his talon-hand, hardened and misshapen by manual labor,
but if ugly, then ugly with the majesty of the twisted, tempest-
defying oak, over hers. "Believe me, Margaret, you love me. You
have loved me all along....And I you."

"Don't deceive yourself," she felt bound to say, "I certainly do