God." He walked away to the chair he had invited her
to and stood behind it, gripping its padded leather back. "He wrote your
brother a letter then." He had spoken, he thought, quietly and evenly
enough, but the indignation he felt must have betrayed itself in his
voice for she answered instantly:

"You mustn't be angry about that. He had to write to Rush, you see. Rush
had been in his confidence about it all the while. Rush knew his hopes
and his explanations. Rush knew of his coming yesterday, was waiting up
at Wallace Hood's apartment for his news. Now, do you see how horrible it
was? He couldn't tell Rush what I had said to him. There was nothing he
could tell him. He couldn't even face him. He did the only thing I'd left
for him to do."

March asked, "What has he done?"

"We don't know, exactly. Just gone away, I suppose. The letter was
written about midnight from the University Club. He said he wasn't coming
back to Hickory Hill. That he couldn't possibly come back. He'd arrange
things, somehow, later. He told Rush not to try to find him nor make any
sort of fuss, and to be very kind to me; not to question nor worry me."

She broke off there and looked intently up at him. In her eyes he thought
he saw incredulity fighting against a dawning hope. "I wonder," she went
breathlessly on, "if you can understand this, too. Can you see that, for
him, the unbearable thing about it--was that it was ludicrous? The
contrast between what he had believed me to be and--what I am?"

He interrupted sharply, with a frown of irritation, "Don't put it
like that!"

"Well, then," she amended, "the contrast between his explanation of the
way I had been treating him, and the true one?"

"That is a thing I think I can understand," he said. "It was a sort
of--awakening of Don Quixote. To a fine sensitive boy nothing could give
a sharper wrench than that.--I'm moving in the dark," he added. Yet he
knew he was drawing near the light. The secret he had set out to discover
was not very far away.

"You see well enough," she said. "Better than Rush, though I tried to
explain it to him. He'd caught a surmise of the truth, too, I think, in
New York, when he came back from France and brought me home. But he
wouldn't look. Father wouldn't, either, once when I tried to tell him
about it. It was too horrible to be thought,--let alone believed.--I
don't quite see how I can have gone on believing it myself."

The look he saw in her eyes made h