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 "No?" She laughed aloud. "It wasn't? You were not in love with me; but wasn't I to pay you for this journey by never thinking of anybody but you? You were to have all of me that is worth anything; you were to have all of my thoughts. If I thought of anything else you were enraged. You don't call that jealousy?"

"Not of you, I said."

"Then of what?"

"It was of" His voice began to tremble; he bit his lip, and sank down in his chair, with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. "It was of my ideal of you!" he groaned.

She was far from being mollified by this definition;—on the contrary, she spoke with repressed but sharpened hostility. "Of your 'ideal' of me? Will you condescend to explain yourself?"

"I thought—I thought you were above every human sordidness," he said miserably. "I thought you were—I thought you were the highest and brightest—well, if I must talk like a schoolboy to make it clear, I thought you were the most goddess-like creature I'd ever seen. But what I found"

"Pooh!" she said, startling him with abrupt laugh-