Then shutting the door, she began pacing the floor, fighting once more the battle which during that last ten days she had often fought with herself and of which she was thoroughly weary.

"Oh," she groaned, wringing her hands, "I cannot do it.

I cannot look at him." She thought of that calm, impassive face which for the past three months this English gentleman had carried in all of his intercourse with her, and over against that reserve of his she contrasted her own passionate abandonment of herself in that dreadful moment of self-revelation.

The contrast caused her to writhe in an agony of self-loathing.

She knew little of men, but instinctively she felt that in his sight she had cheapened herself and never could she bear to look at him again.