y an impulse which she did
not comprehend. "You did it for her."

"Oh, for her! What does it matter since it is done? Say that it was
an accident--a folly--that I am sorry too."

"No," said the girl softly; "you are glad."

He shrugged his shoulders with increasing weariness, an immense
desire to have the subject ended and put away with forgotten things.

"I am glad, then. Have it as you like."

But she resumed with a pertinacity which his irritated nerves found
malignant.

"If it was that," she said ambiguously, "you had better have held
your tongue. You had only to gain---- Ah, why did you do it? What
was the good?"

He made another gesture of lassitude; then, rousing himself, he
remarked:

"It was a calculation, then, a piece of simple arithmetic. If it
gives her a little peace a little longer, why should three persons
suffer--be sacrificed--when two might serve?"

"Oh, him!" cried the girl scornfully; "he can't suffer--he hasn't a
heart!"

Rainham looked up at her at last. His fingers ceased playing with
his ring.

"Oh, let me count for a little," he murmured, with a little, ghastly
laugh.

The girl's eyes looked full into his, and in a moment they shone out
of her face, which was suffused with a rosy flush that made her
almost beautiful, with the illumination of some transcendent idea.

"Ah, you _are_ a gentleman!" she cried.

In the tension of their nerves they were neither aware that the cab
had come to a standstill, and before he could prevent her, she had
stooped swiftly down and caught his hand passionately to her lips.

"Heaven forgive me! How unhappy you must be!" she said.

CHAPTER XXV

After all, things were not so complicated as they seemed. For Kitty
was nearly at the end of her troubles; her trivial little life, with
its commonplace tale of careless wrong and short-lived irony of
suffering, telling with the more effect on a nature at once so light
and so wanting in buoyancy, was soon to be hurried away and
forgotten, amid the chaos of things broken and ruined.

"I don't want to die," she said, day after day, to the sternly
cheerful nurse who had her in charge at the quiet, sunny hospital in
the suburbs, where Rainham had gained admission for her as
in-patient. "But I don't know that I want to live, either."

And so it had been from the beginning, poor soul, poor wavering
fatalist! with a nature too innately weak to make an inception
either of good or evil, the predestine