THE TOUCHSTONE
their artificial complexity. He had already acquitted her of any connivance in his baseness, and he felt only that he loved her and that she had escaped him. This was now, strangely enough, his dominant thought: the sense that he and she had passed through the fusion of love and had emerged from it as incommunicably apart as though the transmutation had never taken place. Every other passion, he mused, left some mark upon the nature; but love passed like the flight of a ship across the waters.
She dropped into her usual seat near the lamp, and he leaned against the chimney, moving about with an inattentive hand the knick-knacks on the mantel.
Suddenly he caught sight of her reflection in the mirror. She was looking at him. He turned and their eyes met.
He moved across the room.
"There's something that I want to say to you," he began.
She held his gaze, but her color deepened. He noticed again, with a jealous pang, how her beauty
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