Ralph looked keenly at her. Very pale, but sternly
concentrated upon her meaning, beautiful but so little aware of
herself as to seem remote from him also, there was something distant
and abstract about her which exalted him and chilled him at the same
time.
"No, you're right," he said. "I don't know you. I've never known you."
"Yet perhaps you know me better than any one else," she mused.
Some detached instinct made her aware that she was gazing at a book
which belonged by rights to some other part of the house. She walked
over to the shelf, took it down, and returned to her seat, placing the
book on the table between them. Ralph opened it and looked at the
portrait of a man with a voluminous white shirt-collar, which formed
the frontispiece.
"I say I do know you, Katharine," he affirmed, shutting the book.
"It's only for moments that I go mad."
"Do you call two whole nights a moment?"
"I swear to you that now, at this instant, I see you precisely as you
are. No one has ever known you as I know you. . . . Could you have
taken down that book just now if I hadn't known you?"
"That's true," she replied, "but you can't think how I'm divided--how
I'm at my ease with you, and how I'm bewildered.
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