r contemptible, pharisaical notions of morality they choose to
forget what my mother and father were to them, they cease to exist for
me. If it's the last act of my life I'm going to tell them so."

She stood gazing at him, but she was as one of whom he took no account.
He turned to the desk and began to write with a deliberation all the
more terrible to her because of the white anger he felt. And still she
stood. He pressed the button on his desk, and Starling responded.

"I want a man from the stable to be ready to take some letters to town
in half an hour," he said.

It was not until then that she turned and slowly left the room. A mortal
sickness seemed to invade her vitals, and she went to her own chamber
and flung herself, face downward, on the lace covering of the bed: and
the sobs that shook her were the totterings of the foundations of her
universe. For a while, in the intensity of her anguish, all thought was
excluded. Presently, however, when the body was spent, the mind began
to practise its subtle and intolerable torture, and she was invaded by a
sense of loneliness colder than the space between the worlds.

Where was she to go, whither flee, now that his wrath was turned
against her? On the strength of his love alone she had pinned her faith,
discarded and scorned all other help. And at the first contact with that
greater power which he had taught her so confidently to despise, that
strength had broken!

Slowly, she gazed back over the path she had trod; where roses once had
held up smiling heads. It was choked now by brambles that scratched her
nakedness at every step. Ah, how easily she had been persuaded to enter
it! "We have the right to happiness," he had said, and she had
looked into his eyes and believed him. What was this strange, elusive
happiness, that she had so pantingly pursued and never overtaken? that
essence pure and unalloyed with baser things? Ecstasy, perhaps, she had
found--for was it delirium? Fear was the boon companion of these; or
better, the pestilence that stalked behind them, ever ready to strike.

Then, as though some one had turned on a light--a sickening, yet
penetrating blue light--she looked at Hugh Chiltern. She did not wish to
look, but that which had turned on the light and bade her was stronger
than she. She beheld, as it were, the elements of his being, the very
sources of the ceaseless, restless energy that was driving him on. And
scan as she would, no traces of t