unforgiving, lest perhaps you might regret."

Lily did not cry. Her indignation was vented in broken phrases, the
meaning of which she did not seem to realize, and so jarred and
shaken were her nerves that without being aware of it her talk
branched into observations on her mother, her home life, the convent,
and the disappointments of childhood. So incoherently did she speak
that for a moment Mike feared her brain was affected, and his efforts
to lead her to speak of the present were fruitless. But suddenly,
waxing calm, her inner nature shining through the eyes like light
through porcelain, she said--

"I was wrong to come here, but I imagined men different. We know so
little of the world in the convent.... Ah, I should have stayed
there. It may be but a poor delusion, but it is better than such
wickedness."

"But I love you."

"Love me! ... You say you have sought love; we find love in
contemplation and desire of higher things. I am wanting in
experience, but I know that love lives in thought, and not in violent
passion; I know that a look from the loved one on entering a room,
a touch of a hand at most will suffice, and I should have been
satisfied to have seen your windows, and I should have gone away, my
heart stored with impressions of you, and I should have been happy
for weeks in the secret possession of such memories. So I have always
understood love; so we understood love in the convent."

They were standing face to face in the faint twilight and scent of