hich her brain could evolve--and yet that flame had
slackened and smouldered and finally died out entirely. Self-shame,
self-scorn even, could not rekindle it.

Her lips were no longer white and straight and feverish with contempt;
they were damp and full again, and curved and half-open with
compassion. The ache was still there in her breast--a great gnawing
pain which it seemed at that moment time could never remove, but it
was no longer the wild hatred which made her pant with a desire to
make him suffer, too, just as she had suffered that night through.
The pain was just as great, but it was pity now--only pity and an
unaccountable yearning to draw that bruised face down against her and
croon over it.

In spite of the numbness, in spite of the lassitude which that
burnt-out passion had left behind in brain and body, she knew what it
meant. She understood. She had hated his weakness; she still hated his
lack of manhood which had made him fail her. That hatred would be a
long time dying now--if it ever did perish. But she couldn't hate
_him_! She looked that fact in the face, dumb at first at the
awakening. She couldn't hate him--not the man he was! There was a
distinction--a difference very clear to her woman-brain. She could
despise his cowardice; she could despise herself for caring still--but
the caring still went on. Half-vaguely she realized it, but she knew
the change had come. The girlishness was gone from it forever. She had
to care now as a woman always cares--not for the thing he was, but in
spite of it.

"I ought to hate him," she told herself once, aloud. "I know I ought
to hate him, and yet--and yet I don't believe I can. Why, I--I can't
even hate myself, as I did a little while back, because I still
care!"

It was a habit that had grown out of her long loneliness--those
half-whispered conversations with herself. And now only one conviction
remained. Again and again she told herself that she could not go to
meet him that night--could not go, even if he should call to her. And
that, too, she put into whispered words.

"Even if he lights the window, I can't--I couldn't! Oh, not tonight!
He won't--he won't think of it. But I couldn't let him touch
me--until--until I've had a little time to forget!"

But she was watching still--watching with small, gold-crowned head
nodding heavily, eyes half-veiled with sinking lids--when that
half-shaded window in the dark house glowed suddenly yellow with the
ligh