want his death on my hands. These people who kill one another, and
even themselves, for love, exist of course; but to me they're
ridiculous. The game isn't worth it. There are too many other things
in life. As for me, my work, that part of it out there unfinished,
dropped so that I could run back here and clear this matter up----"

"No, I'm the one that you're killing," she returned, bowing her head
that was glorified in the sunshine pouring round her, as if with a
crown of celestial happiness.

He went on in a deliberate, grave tone, feeling logical and dizzy,
replete with self-justification, magnanimity, and horror:

"I managed to arrive in this country secretly. There are only three
persons in New York who know that I'm here, or, for that matter, alive.
It may help a little if I succeed in slipping away as quietly as I
came. You can get your divorce on grounds of desertion. I'm sorry
enough to have let you in for this. It's my fault from beginning to
end. I shouldn't have appeared then, and worst of all I shouldn't have
reappeared now." He hesitated; then, glancing toward the door of the
fernery, "No doubt you'll discover how to smooth it out with him.
After all, if he were the most sensitive creature on earth, he ought to
be satisfied when he understands that though I've popped up alive he is
the one you've chosen."

"You are mad," she gasped, giving a convulsive bound amid the red
cushions.

He wondered if it were so.

Here she was before his eyes, more beautiful than in any of his dreams,
a diffuse vision compressed once more into a tangible form, fragrant
and warm, full of coursing blood and tremors, no doubt still capable of
those same ecstatic appearances and vocal rhapsodies. All his
swarming, jealous thoughts were consuming him, as warrior ants might
consume some wretched victim of King Muene-Motapa. He felt that this
deliberate farce must end, that he must spring through the door, find
the other, kill him with one blow, and then rush away from this woman
who, like a fallen deity, lay weeping again, her face between her arms,
somehow pathetic under this retribution for the inconstancy that she
pretended was pity.

She raised her face, and pronounced:

"There must be some way. But I can't think any more."

"There are two ways. One is for me to go. The other is to tell him."

She sat up and clutched the cushions on each side of her.

"You ask me to go into that room, and you might as