'll go now, and come back when I am
calm. You'll be better alone--"

For the first time in five years he left her without a kiss or a caress,
and Vanna sat, stunned and motionless, gazing on the ruins of her life.
No one came near to interrupt her solitude. It was a rule that she
should be uninterrupted when Piers was present, and his departure had
apparently passed unnoticed by the household. A dense, overhanging
shadow possessed her spirit, out of which one thought alone was clear.
Piers was unhappy. She, who would have sheltered him from every ill,
had brought upon him the keenest suffering of his life.

Two hours later, when Piers himself opened the door, he found Vanna in
practically the same attitude in which he had left her, crouched in the
corner of the sofa. The fire had died out in the grate, and the air of
the little room struck bleak and chill. The face turned towards him had
the delicacy of an etching, the dark brows arched above the deep-set
eyes, the finely moulded cheeks white and wan. Unlike most women,
Vanna's attraction was distinct from colour; she looked her best, not
her worst, in minutes of mental strain. Piers closed the door,
approached her hastily, and, taking her hands in his, drew her to his
side. He spoke but two words, but they were prompted by the force which
is the greatest diviner of the needs of the human heart, and the whole
wealth of the language could not have added to their eloquence.

"_My Joy_!" he said, in that deep, full voice which Vanna had heard but
once or twice before, in the great moments of their love.

They wept, and clung together, and Vanna's hungry heart found comfort
once more. After all, would she have been more content if Piers had
_not_ rebelled?

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE.

PARTED.

The next year passed slowly and heavily. In the spring Jean had an
illness which made it necessary for her to spend several months on the
sofa--a decree which she accepted with extraordinary resignation.
Nothing could have demonstrated so powerfully the change which the last
seven years had wrought in her physical condition as this willingness to
be shut off from social life.

"I've been so tired," she confided in Vanna, letting her head fall back
on the pillow, and closing her eyes with a long-drawn sigh, "so tired,
that it's been a struggle to get through each day. It's bliss to be
lazy, and to feel that one is justified. When I wake up in the morning
and remembe