But you don't begin"-- she continued blandly enough to work it out for him; "or you can't at least originally have begun.

Any one would know that now--from the terrific effect I see I produce on you--by talking this way.

There it is--it's all out before one knows it, isn't it, and I can't help it any more than you can, can I ?" So she appeared to put it to him, with something in her lucidity that would have been infinitely touching; a strange grave calm consciousness of their common doom and of what in especial in it would be worst for herself.

He sprang up indeed after an instant as if he had been infinitely touched; he turned away, taking just near her a few steps to and fro, gazed about the place again, but this time without the air of particularly seeing it, and then came back to her as if from a greater distance.

An observer at all initiated would, at the juncture, fairly have hung on his lips, and there was in fact on Vanderbank's part quite the look of the man--though it lasted but just while we seize it--in suspense about himself.