cried out now:

"Why didn't I go?"

He had been faithful and loyal ever since, and she had called his
faithfulness importunity and his loyalty a humiliation. She struck a
match and looked at her watch and by habit wound it up. And she drearily
wondered on how many, many nights she would have to wind it up and
speculate in ignorance what he, her lover, was doing and in what corner
of the world, before the end of her days was reached. What would become
of her? she asked. And she raised the corner of a curtain and glanced at
the bright picture of what might have been. And glancing at it, the
demand for happiness raised her in revolt.

She lit her candle and wrote another letter, of the shortest. It
contained but these few words:

"Oh, please forgive me! Come back and forgive. Oh, you must!--SYLVIA."

And having written them, Sylvia stole quietly down-stairs, let herself
out at the door and posted them.

Two nights afterward she leaned out of her window at midnight, wondering
whether by the morrow's post she would receive an answer to her message.
And while she wondered she understood that the answer would not come that
way. For suddenly in the moonlit road beneath her, she saw standing the
one who was to send it. Chayne had brought his answer himself. For a
moment she distrusted her own eyes, believing that her thoughts had
raised this phantom to delude her. But the figure in the road moved
beneath her window and she heard his voice call to her:

"Sylvia! Sylvia!"

CHAPTER XIX

THE SHADOW IN THE ROOM

Sylvia raised her hand suddenly, enjoining silence, and turned back into
the room. She had heard a door slam violently within the house; and now
from the hall voices rose. Her father and Walter Hine were coming up
early to-night from the library, and it seemed in anger. At all events
Walter Hine was angry. His voice rang up the stairway shrill and violent.

"Why do you keep it from me? I will have it, I tell you. I am not a
child," and an oath or two garnished the sentences.

Sylvia heard her father reply with the patronage which never failed to
sting the vanity of his companion, which was the surest means to provoke
a quarrel, if a quarrel he desired.

"Go to bed, Wallie! Leave such things to Archie Parminter! You are
too young."

His voice was friendly, but a little louder than he generally used, so
that Sylvia clearly distinguished every word; so clearly indeed, that had
he wished her to hear, th