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Rh taught me to hate it as I never did before, because it is the thing which separates us. You have shown me the self-centred satisfaction of those who worship it"

She put out her hands with a sudden cry.

"Go! Oh, go! You are hurting me too much!"

He sprang up and stooped over her.

"I will come back to you," he said. "I shall keep on coming back while I live, and I will wear down your resistance, Jennifer. I will have you, if I die for it—or if I make you die for it. My work will keep me in the West just now, and you will be in the East. But I shall come to you again. I shall come."

He took her hands down from before her eyes.

"Your little gods won't make you happy," he said. "We are men and women on this old earth, Jennifer, and not fantastic spiritual anomalies. You want me, and you will never stop wanting me. You know what I have done to yourself and Ducane, and yet you cannot love me the less. You know that I laugh at all the tenets which you believe, and yet you cannot love me the less. This proves that love is not a spiritual thing and that it is sheer imbecility to put it on a spiritual plane. You are wrecking both our lives for nothing—nothing!"

"It is often the nothings of earth which grow to the everythings of Heaven," she said.

The white, brave sadness of her face halted the impatient anger on his tongue. He lifted her hands, kissed them, and laid them back on her lap.

"I have lived enough to know that we all blind ourselves, and that no man has the right to judge his fellow," he said. "You believe that you are right, you poor little girl, and you are going to make us both suffer for your belief. I believe that you are wrong, and I'll convince you of it yet. A man takes his stand on reason and a woman on sentiment. If I give way on some points you must do the same. And I will not say good-bye to you, for I mean to come back."

She watched him cross to the door and turn to look at her. And she raised herself in the big chair.

"Good-bye," she said. But he shook his head with a sudden, half-whimsical smile, and shut the door behind him.