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 in his thoughts for a space, and then he said somewhat tardily, "He may still be all those things."

"I suppose he may," she said slowly and without colour. The weeping moment had passed.

"What is she?" she changed abruptly. "What is this being, who has come between him and all the realities of life? What is there about her—? And why should I have to compete with her, because he—because he doesn't know his own mind?"

"For a man," said Melville, "to know his own mind is—to have exhausted one of the chief interests in life. After that—! A cultivated extinct volcano—if ever it was a volcano."

He reflected egotistically for a space. Then with a secret start he came back to consider her.

"What is there," she said, with that