She was silent that evening, so silent that Grbits, the unobservant, commented to Kato; but after they had dined, all four, by the fountain in the court, she flung aside her preoccupation, laughed and sang, forced Kato to the piano, and danced with reckless inspiration to the accompaniment of Kato's songs. Julian, leaning against a column, watched her bewildering gaiety. She had galvanised Grbits into movement—he who was usually bashful with women, especially with Eve, reserving his enthusiasm for Julian—and as she passed and re-passed before Julian in the grasp of the giant she flung at him provocative glances charged with a special meaning he could not interpret; in the turn of her dance he caught her smile and the flash of her eyes, and smiled in response, but his smile was grave, for his mind ran now upon the crisis with Herakleion, and, moreover, he suffered to see Eve so held by Grbits, her turbulent head below the giant's shoulder, and regretted that her gaiety should not be reserved for him alone. Across the court, through the open door of the drawing-room, he could see Kato at the piano, full of delight, her broad little fat hands and wrists racing above the keyboard, her short torso swaying to the rhythm, her rich voice humming, and the gold wheat ears shaking in her hair. She called to him, and, drawing a chair close to the piano, he sat beside her, but through the door he continued to stare at Eve dancing in the court. Kato said as she played, her perception sharpened by the tormented watch she kept on him,—

'Eve celebrates your victory of yesterday,' to which he replied, deceived by the kindly sympathy in her eyes,—

'Eve celebrates her own high spirits and the enjoyment of a new partner; my doings are of the last indifference to her.'

Kato played louder; she bent towards him,—

'You love her so much, Julian?'

He made an unexpected answer,—

'I believe in her.'

Kato, a shrewd woman, observed him, thinking,—'He does not; he wants to convince himself.'

She said aloud, conscientiously wrenching out the truth as she saw it,—

'She loves you; she is capable of love such as is granted to few; that is the sublime in her.'

He seized upon this, hungrily, missing meanwhile the sublime in the honesty of the singer,—

'Since I am given so much, I should not exact more. The Islands.... She gives all to me. I ought not to force the Islands upon her.'

'Grapes of thistles,' Kato said softly.

'You understand,' he murmured with gratitude. 'But why should she hamper me, Anastasia? Are all women so irrational? What am I to believe?'

'We are not so irrational as we appear,' Kato said, 'because our wildest sophistry has always its roots in the truth of instinct.'

Eve was near them, crying out,—

'A tarantella, Anastasia!'

Julian sprang up; he caught her by the wrist,—

'Gipsy!'

'Come with the gipsy?' she whispered.

Her scented hair blew near him, and her face was upturned, with its soft, sweet mouth.

'Away from Aphros?' he said, losing his head.

'All over the world!'

He was suddenly swept away by the full force of her wild, irresponsible seduction.

'Anywhere you choose, Eve.'

She triumphed, close to him, and wanton.

'You'd sacrifice Aphros to me?'

'Anything you asked for,' he said desperately.

She laughed, and danced away, stretching out her hands towards him,—

'Join in the saraband, Julian?'

She was alone in her room. Her emotion and excitement were so intense that they drained her of physical strength, leaving her faint and cold; her eyes closed now and then as under the pressure of pain; she yawned, and her breath came shortly between her lips; she sat by the open window, rose to move about the room, sat again, rose again, passed her hand constantly over her forehead, or pressed it against the base of her throat. The room was in darkness; there was no moon, only the stars hung over the black gulf of the sea. She could see the long, low lights of Herakleion, and the bright red light of the pier. She could hear distant shouting, and an occasional shot. In the room behind her, her bed was disordered. She wore only her Spanish shawl thrown over her long nightgown; her hair hung in its thick plait. Sometimes she formed, in a whisper, the single word, 'Julian!'

She thought of Julian. Julian's rough head and angry eyes. Julian when he said, 'I shall break you,' like a man speaking to a wild young supple tree. (Her laugh of derision, and her rejoicing in her secret fear!) Julian in his lazy ownership of her beauty. Julian when he allowed her to coax him from his moroseness. Julian when she was afraid of him and of the storm she had herself aroused: Julian passionate....

Julian whom she blindly wanted for herself alone.

That desire had risen to its climax. The light of no other consideration filtered through into her closely shuttered heart. She had waited for Julian, schemed for Julian, battled for Julian; this was the final battle. She had not foreseen it. She had tolerated and even welcomed the existence of the Islands until she began to realise that they took part of Julian from her. Then she hated them insanely, implacably; including Kato, whom Julian had called their tutelary deity, in that hatred. Had Julian possessed a dog, she would have hated that too.

The ambitions she had vaguely cherished for him had not survived the test of surrendering a portion of her own inordinate claim.

She had joined battle with the Islands as with a malignant personality. She was fighting them for the possession of Julian as she might have fought a woman she thought more beautiful, more unscrupulous, more appealing than herself, but with very little doubt of ultimate victory. Julian would be hers, at last; more completely hers than he had been even in those ideal, uninterrupted days before Grbits and Kato came, the days when he forgot his obligations, almost his life's dream for her. Love all-eclipsing.... She stood at the window, oppressed and tense, but in the soft silken swaying of her loose garments against her limbs she still found a delicately luxurious comfort.

Julian had been called away, called by the violent hammering on the house-door; it had then been after midnight. Two hours had passed since then. No one had come to her, but she had heard the tumult of many voices in the streets, and by leaning far out of the window she could see a great flare burning up from the market-place. She had thought a house might be on fire. She could not look back over her dispositions; they had been completed in a dream, as though under direct dictation. It did not occur to her to be concerned as to their possible miscarriage; she was too ignorant of such matters, too unpractical, to be troubled by any such anxiety. She had carried out Malteios' instructions with intense concentration; there her part had ended. The fuse which she had fired was burning.... If Julian would return, to put an end to her impatience!

(Down in the market-place the wooden school-buildings flamed and crackled, redly lighting up the night, and fountains of sparks flew upward against the sky. The lurid market-place was thronged with sullen groups of islanders, under the guard of the soldiers of Herakleion. In the centre, on the cobbles, lay the body of Tsigaridis, on his back, arms flung open, still, in the enormous pool of blood that crept and stained the edges of his spread white fustanelle. Many of the islanders were not fully dressed, but had run out half-naked from their houses, only to be captured and disarmed by the troops; the weapons which had been taken from them lay heaped near the body of Tsigaridis, the light of the flames gleaming along the blades of knives and the barrels of rifles, and on the bare bronzed chests of men, and limbs streaked with trickles of bright red blood. They stood proudly, contemptuous of their wounds, arms folded, some with rough bandages about their heads. PanaÏoannou, leaning both hands on the hilt of his sword, and grinning sardonically beneath his fierce moustaches, surveyed the place from the steps of the assembly-room).

Eve in her now silent room realised that all sounds of tumult had died away. A shivering came over her, and, impelled by a suddenly understood necessity, she lit the candles on her dressing-table and, as the room sprang into light, began flinging the clothes out of the drawers into a heap in the middle of the floor. They fluttered softly from her hands, falling together in all their diverse loveliness of colour and fragility of texture. She paused to smile to them, friends and allies. She remembered now, with the fidelity of a child over a well-learnt lesson, the final words of Malteios, 'A boat ready for you both to-night, secret and without delay,' as earlier in the evening she had remembered his other words, 'Midnight, at the creek at the back of the islands ...'; she had acted upon her lesson mechanically, and in its due sequence, conscientious, trustful.

She stood amongst her clothes, the long red sari which she had worn on the evening of Julian's first triumph drooping from her hand. They foamed about her feet as she stood doubtfully above them, strangely brilliant herself in her Spanish shawl. They lay in a pool of rich delicacy upon the floor. They hung over the backs of chairs, and across the tumbled bed. They pleased her; she thought them pretty. Stooping, she raised them one by one, and allowed them to drop back on to the heap, aware that she must pack them and must also dress herself. But she liked their butterfly colours and gentle rustle, and, remembering that Julian liked them too, smiled to them again. He found her standing there amongst them when after a knock at her door he came slowly into her room.

He remained by the door for a long while looking at her in silence. She had made a sudden, happy movement towards him, but inexplicably had stopped, and with the sari still in her hand gazed back at him, waiting for him to speak. He looked above all, mortally tired. She discovered no anger in his face, not even sorrow; only that mortal weariness. She was touched; she to whom those gentler emotions were usually foreign.

'Julian?' she said, seized with doubt.

'It is all over,' he began, quite quietly, and he put his hand against his forehead, which was still bandaged, raising his arm with the same lassitude; 'they landed where young Zapantiotis was on guard, and he let them through; they were almost at the village before they were discovered. There was very little fighting. They have allowed me to come here. They are waiting for me downstairs. I am to leave.'

'Yes,' she said, and looked down at her heap of clothes.

He did not speak again, and gradually she realised the implication of his words.

'Zapantiotis....' she said.

'Yes,' he said, raising his eyes again to her face, 'yes, you see, Zapantiotis confessed it all to me when he saw me. He was standing amongst a group of prisoners, in the market-place, but when I came by he broke away from the guards and screamed out to me that he had betrayed us. Betrayed us. He said he was tempted, bribed. He said he would cut his own throat. But I told him not to do that.'

She began to tremble, wondering how much he knew. He added, in the saddest voice she had ever heard,—

'Zapantiotis, an islander, could not be faithful.'

Then she was terrified; she did not know what was coming next, what would be the outcome of this quietness. She wanted to go towards him, but she could only remain motionless, holding the sari up to her breast as a means of protection.

'At least,' he said, 'old Zapantiotis is dead, and will never know about his son. Where can one look for fidelity? Tsigaridis is dead too, and Grbits. I am ashamed of being alive.'

She noticed then that he was disarmed.

'Why do you stand over there, Julian?' she said timidly.

'I wonder how much you promised Zapantiotis?' he said in a speculative voice; and next, stating a fact, 'You were, of course, acting on Malteios' suggestion.'

'You know?' she breathed. She was quite sure now that he was going to kill her.

'Zapantiotis tried to tell me that too—in a strange jumble of confessions. But they dragged him away before he could say more than your bare name. That was enough for me. So I know, Eve.'

'Is that all you were going to say?'

He raised his arms and let them fall.

'What is there to say?'

Knowing him very well, she saw that his quietness was dropping from him; she was aware of it perhaps before he was aware of it himself. His eyes were losing their dead apathy, and were travelling round the room; they rested on the heap of clothes, on her own drawing of himself hanging on the wall, on the disordered bed. They flamed suddenly, and he made a step towards her.

'Why? why? why?' he cried out with the utmost anguish and vehemence, but stopped himself, and stood with clenched fists. She shrank away. 'All gone—in an hour!' he said, and striding towards her he stood over her, shaken with a tempest of passion. She shrank farther from him, retreating against the wall, but first she stooped and gathered her clothes around her again, pressing her back against the wall and cowering with the clothes as a rampart round her feet. But as yet full realisation was denied her; she knew that he was angry, she thought indeed that he might kill her, but to other thoughts of finality she was, in all innocence, a stranger.

He spoke incoherently, saying, 'All gone! All gone!' in accents of blind pain, and once he said, 'I thought you loved me,' putting his hands to his head as though walls were crumbling. He made no further reproach, save to repeat, 'I thought the men were faithful, and that you loved me,' and all the while he trembled with the effort of his self-control, and his twitching hands reached out towards her once or twice, but he forced them back. She thought, 'How angry he is! but he will forget, and I shall make up to him for what he has lost.' So, between them, they remained almost silent, breathing hard, and staring at one another.

'Come, put up your clothes quickly,' he said at last, pointing; 'they want us off the island, and if we do not go of our own accord they will tie our hands and feet and carry us to the boat. Let us spare ourselves that ludicrous scene. We can marry in Athens to-morrow.'

'Marry?' she repeated.

'Naturally. What else did you suppose? That I should leave you? now? Put up your clothes. Shall I help you? Come!'

'But—marry, Julian?'

'Clearly: marry,' he replied in a harsh voice, and added, 'Let us go. For God's sake, let us go now! I feel stunned, I mustn't begin to think. Let us go.' He urged her towards the door.

'But we had nothing to do with marriage,' she whispered.

He cried, so loudly and so bitterly that she was startled,—

'No, we had to do only with love—love and rebellion! And both have failed me. Now, instead of love, we must have marriage; and instead of rebellion, law. I shall help on authority, instead of opposing it.' He broke down and buried his face in his hands.

'You no longer love me,' she said slowly, and her eyes narrowed and turned slightly inwards in the way Malteios had noticed. 'Then the Islands....'

He pressed both hands against his temples and screamed like one possessed, 'But they were all in all in all! It isn't the thing, it's the soul behind the thing. In robbing me of them you've robbed me of more than them—you've robbed me of all the meaning that lay behind them.' He retained just sufficient self-possession to realise this. 'I knew you were hostile, how could I fail to know it? but I persuaded myself that you were part of Aphros, part of all my beliefs, even something beyond all my beliefs. I loved you, so you and they had to be reconciled. I reconciled you in secret. I gave up mentioning the Islands to you because it stabbed me to see your indifference. It destroyed the illusion I was cherishing. So I built up fresh, separate illusions about you. I have been living on illusions, now I have nothing left but facts. I owe this to you, to you, to you!'

'You no longer love me,' she said again. She could think of nothing else. She had not listened to his bitter and broken phrases. 'You no longer love me, Julian.'

'I was so determined that I would be deceived by no woman, and like every one else I have fallen into the trap. Because you were you, I ceased to be on my guard. Oh, you never pretended to care for Aphros; I grant you that honesty; but I wanted to delude myself and so I was deluded. I told myself marvellous tales of your rarity; I thought you were above even Aphros. I am punished for my weakness in bringing you here. Why hadn't I the strength to remain solitary? I reproach myself; I had not the right to expose my Islands to such a danger. But how could I have known? how could I have known?'

'Clearly you no longer love me,' she said for the third time.

'Zapantiotis sold his soul for money—was it money you promised him?' he went on. 'So easily—just for a little money! His soul, and all of us, for money. Money, father's god; he's a wise man, father, to serve the only remunerative god. Was it money you promised Zapantiotis?' he shouted at her, seizing her by the arm, 'or was he, perhaps, like Paul, in love with you? Did you perhaps promise him yourself? How am I to know? There may still be depths in you—you woman—that I know nothing about. Did you give yourself to Zapantiotis? Or is he coming to-night for his reward? Did you mean to ship me off to Athens, you and your accomplices, while you waited here in this room—our room—for your lover?'

'Julian!' she cried—he had forced her on to her knees—'you are saying monstrous things.'

'You drive me to them,' he replied; 'when I think that while the troops were landing you lay in my arms, here, knowing all the while that you had betrayed me—I could believe anything of you. Monstrous things! Do you know what monstrous things I am thinking? That you shall not belong to Zapantiotis, but to me. Yes, to me. You destroy love, but desire revives, without love; horrible, but sufficient. That's what I am thinking. I dare say I could kiss you still, and forget. Come!'

He was beside himself.

'Your accusations are so outrageous,' she said, half-fainting, 'your suggestions are obscene, Julian; I would rather you killed me at once.'

'Then answer me about Zapantiotis. How am I to know?' he repeated, already slightly ashamed of his outburst, 'I'm readjusting my ideas. Tell me the truth; I scarcely care.'

'Believe what you choose,' she replied, although he still held her, terrified, on the ground at his feet, 'I have more pride than you credit me with—too much to answer you.'

'It was money,' he said after a pause, releasing her. She stood up; reaction overcame her, and she wept.

'Julian, that you should believe that of me! You cut me to the quick—and I gave myself to you with such pride and gladness' she added almost inaudibly.

'Forgive me; I suppose you, also, have your own moral code; I have speculated sufficiently about it, Heaven knows, but that means very little to me now,' he said, more quietly, and with even a spark of detached interest and curiosity. But he did not pursue the subject. 'What do you want done with your clothes? We have wasted quite enough time.'

'You want me to come with you?'

'You sound incredulous; why?'

'I know you have ceased to love me. You spoke of marrying me. Your love must have been a poor flimsy thing, to topple over as it has toppled! Mine is more tenacious, alas. It would not depend on outside happenings.'

'How dare you accuse me?' he said,' You destroy and take from me all that I care for' ('Yes,' she interpolated, as much bitterness in her voice as in his own—but all the time they were talking against one another—'you cared for everything but me'), 'then you brand my love for you as a poor flimsy thing. If you have killed it, you have done so by taking away the one thing....'

'That you cared for more than for me,' she completed.

'With which I would have associated you. You yourself made that association impossible. You hated the things I loved. Now you've killed those things, and my love for you with them. You've killed everything I cherished and possessed.'

'Dead? Irretrievably?' she whispered.

'Dead.'

He saw her widened and swimming eyes, and added, too much stunned for personal malice, yet angry because of the pain he was suffering,—

'You shall never be jealous of me again. I think I've loved all women, loving you—gone through the whole of love, and now washed my hands of it; I've tested and plumbed your vanity, your hideous egotism'—she was crying like a child, unreservedly, her face hidden against her arm—'your lack of breadth in everything that was not love.'

As he spoke, she raised her face and he saw light breaking on her—although it was not, and never would be, precisely the light he desired. It was illumination and horror; agonised horror, incredulous dismay. Her eyes were streaming with tears, but they searched him imploringly, despairingly, as in a new voice she said,—

'I've hurt you, Julian ... how I've hurt you! Hurt you! I would have died for you. Can't I put it right? oh, tell me! Will you kill me?' and she put her hand up to her throat, offering it. 'Julian, I've hurt you ... my own, my Julian. What have I done? What madness made me do it? Oh, what is there now for me to do? only tell me; I do beseech you only to tell me. Shall I go—to whom?—to Malteios? I understand nothing; you must tell me. I wanted you so greedily; you must believe that. Anything, anything you want me to do.... It wasn't sufficient, to love you, to want you; I gave you all I had, but it wasn't sufficient. I loved you wrongly, I suppose; but I loved you, I loved you!'

He had been angry, but now he was seized with a strange pity; pity of her childish bewilderment: the thing that she had perpetrated was a thing she could not understand. She would never fully understand.... He looked at her as she stood crying, and remembered her other aspects, in the flood-time of her joy, careless, radiant, irresponsible; they had shared hours of illimitable happiness.

'Eve! Eve!' he cried, and through the wrenching despair of his cry he heard the funeral note, the tear of cleavage like the downfall of a tree.

He took her in his arms and made her sit upon the bed; she continued to weep, and he sat beside her, stroking her hair. He used terms of endearment towards her, such as he had never used in the whole course of their passionate union, 'Eve, my little Eve'; and he kept on repeating, 'my little Eve,' and pressing her head against his shoulder.

They sat together like two children. Presently she looked up, pushing back her hair with a gesture he knew well.

'We both lose the thing we cared most for upon earth, Julian: you lose the Islands, and I lose you.'

She stood up, and gazed out of the window towards Herakleion. She stood there for some time without speaking, and a fatal clearness spread over her mind, leaving her quite strong, quite resolute, and coldly armoured against every shaft of hope.

'You want me to marry you,' she said at length.

'You must marry me in Athens to-morrow, if possible, and as soon as we are married we can go to England.'

'I utterly refuse,' she said, turning round towards him.

He stared at her; she looked frail and tired, and with one small white hand held together the edges of her Spanish shawl. She was no longer crying.

'Do you suppose,' she went on, 'that not content with having ruined the beginning of your life for you—I realise it now, you see—I shall ruin the rest of it as well? You may believe me or not, I speak the truth like a dying person when I tell you I love you to the point of sin; yes, it's a sin to love as I love you. It's blind, it's criminal. It's my curse, the curse of Eve, to love so well that one loves badly. I didn't see. I wanted you too blindly. Even now I scarcely understand how you can have ceased to love me.—No, don't speak. I do understand it—in a way; and yet I don't understand it. I don't understand that an idea can be dearer to one than the person one loves.... I don't understand responsibilities; when you've talked about responsibilities I've sometimes felt that I was made of other elements than you.... But you're a man, and I'm a woman; that's the rift. Perhaps it's a rift that can never be bridged. Never mind that. Julian, you must find some more civilised woman than myself; find a woman who will be a friend, not an enemy. Love makes me into an enemy, you see. Find somebody more tolerant, more unselfish. More maternal. Yes, that's it,' she said, illuminated, 'more maternal; I'm only a lover, not a mother. You told me once that I was of the sort that sapped and destroyed. I'll admit that, and let you go. You mustn't waste yourself on me. But, oh, Julian,' she said, coming close to him, 'if I give you up—because in giving you up I utterly break myself—grant me one justice: never doubt that I loved you. Promise me, Julian. I shan't love again. But don't doubt that I loved you; don't argue to yourself, "She broke my illusions, therefore she never loved me," let me make amends for what I did, by sending you away now without me.'

'I was angry; I was lying; I wanted to hurt you as you had hurt me,' he said desperately. 'How can I tell what I have been saying to you? I've been dazed, struck.... It's untrue that I no longer love you. I love you, in spite, in spite.... Love can't die in an hour.'

'Bless you,' she said, putting her hand for a moment on his head, 'but you can't deceive me. Oh,' she hurried on, 'you might deceive yourself; you might persuade yourself that you still loved me and wanted me to go with you; but I know better. I'm not for you. I'm not for your happiness, or for any man's happiness. You've said it yourself: I am different. I let you go because you are strong and useful—oh, yes, useful! so disinterested and strong, all that I am not—too good for me to spoil. You have nothing in common with me. Who has? I think I haven't any kindred. I love you! I love you better than myself!'

He stood up; he stammered in his terror and earnestness, but she only shook her head.

'No, Julian.'

'You're too strong,' he cried, 'you little weak thing; stronger than I.'

She smiled; he was unaware of the very small reserve of her strength.

'Stronger than you,' she repeated; 'yes.'

Again he implored her to go with him; he even threatened her, but she continued to shake her head and to say in a faint and tortured voice,—

'Go now, Julian; go, my darling; go now, Julian.'

'With you, or not at all.' He was at last seriously afraid that she meant what she said,

'Without me.'

'Eve, we were so happy. Remember! Only come; we shall be as happy again.'

'You mustn't tempt me; it's cruel,' she said, shivering. 'I'm human.'

'But I love you!' he said. He seized her hands, and tried to drag her towards the door.

'No,' she answered, putting him gently away from her. 'Don't tempt me, Julian, don't; let me make amends in my own way.'

Her gentleness and dignity were such that he now felt reproved, and, dimly, that the wrong done was by him towards her, not by her towards him.

'You are too strong—magnificent, and heartbreaking,' he said in despair.

'As strong as a rock,' she replied, looking straight at him and thinking that at any moment she must fall. But still she forced her lips to a smile of finality.

'Think better of it,' he was beginning, when they heard a stir of commotion in the court below.

'They are coming for you!' she cried out in sudden panic. 'Go; I can't face any one just now....'

He opened the door on to the landing.

'Kato!' he said, falling back. Eve heard the note of fresh anguish in his voice.

Kato came in; even in that hour of horror they saw that she had merely dragged a quilt round her shoulders, and that her hair was down her back. In this guise her appearance was indescribably grotesque.

'Defeated, defeated,' she said in lost tones to Julian. She did not see that they had both involuntarily recoiled before her; she was beyond such considerations.

'Anastasia,' he said, taking her by the arm and shaking her slightly to recall her from her bemusement, 'here is something more urgent—thank God, you will be my ally—Eve must leave Aphros with me; tell her so, tell her so; she refuses.' He shook her more violently with the emphasis of his words.

'If he wants you....' Kato said, looking at Eve, who had retreated into the shadows and stood there, half fainting, supporting herself against the back of a chair. 'If he wants you....' she repeated, in a stupid voice, but her mind was far away.

'You don't understand, Anastasia,' Eve answered; 'it was I that betrayed him.' Again she thought she must fall.

'She is lying!' cried Julian.

'No,' said Eve. She and Kato stared at one another, so preposterously different, yet with currents of truth rushing between them.

'You!' Kato said at last, awaking.

'I am sending him away,' said Eve, speaking as before to the other woman.

'You!' said Kato again. She turned wildly to Julian. 'Why didn't you trust yourself to me, Julian, my beloved?' she cried; 'I wouldn't have treated you so, Julian; why didn't you trust yourself to me?' She pointed at Eve, silent and brilliant in her coloured shawl; then, her glance falling upon her own person, so sordid, so unkempt, she gave a dreadful cry and looked around as though seeking for escape. The other two both turned their heads away; to look at Kato in that moment was more than they could bear.

Presently they heard her speaking again; her self-abandonment had been brief; she had mastered herself, and was making it a point of honour to speak with calmness.

'Julian, the officers have orders that you must leave the island before dawn; if you do not go to them, they will fetch you here. They are waiting below in the courtyard now. Eve,'—her face altered,—'Eve is right: if she has indeed done as she says, she cannot go with you. She is right; she is more right, probably, than she has ever been in her life before or ever will be again. Come, now; I will go with you.'

'Stay with Eve, if I go,' he said.

'Impossible!' replied Kato, instantly hardening, and casting upon Eve a look of hatred and scorn.

'How cruel you are, Anastasia!' said Julian, making a movement of pity towards Eve.

'Take him away, Anastasia,' Eve murmured, shrinking from him.

'See, she understands me better than you do, and understands herself better too,' said Kato, in a tone of cruel triumph; 'if you do not come, Julian, I shall send up the officers.' As she spoke she went out of the room, her quilt trailing, and her heel-less slippers clacking on the boards.

'Eve, for the last time....'

A cry was wrenched from her,—

'Go! if you pity me!'

'I shall come back.'

'Oh, no, no!' she replied, 'you'll never come back. One doesn't live through such things twice.' She shook her head like a tortured animal that seeks to escape from pain. He gave an exclamation of despair, and, after one wild gesture towards her, which she weakly repudiated, he followed Kato. Eve heard their steps upon the stairs, then crossing the courtyard, and the tramp of soldiers; the house-door crashed massively. She stooped very slowly and mechanically, and began to pick up the gay and fragile tissue of her clothes.