mbled, but she forced
herself to speak.

"What do you mean? Say it plainly, Dane, please, quite plainly. Let me
understand!"

"If you will come with me, Cassandra, we'll go abroad. I'll take a
villa in some quiet spot, out of the tourist beat. We could stay there,
together, until... He would divorce you; he is not the kind of man to
shirk that. The case would be undefended, so you would not have to
appear... In less than a year we could be legally married."

"But--but--_my boy_!" cried Cassandra, trembling. She passed her right
hand against Peignton's shoulder, the hand with the emerald ring, and
raised herself from his embrace. There was a look in her eyes which he
had not seen before, the mother-look on guard for her young. It was not
of the stolid, freckled-faced schoolboy that Cassandra was thinking at
that moment, but of the small, soft-breathing thing which had been the
reward of her anguish, which she had greeted with such a passion of joy.

"Dane! have you forgotten my boy?"

"No. I have forgotten nothing. Is the boy more to you than I am,
Cassandra?"

"No. No," she turned to him with eager penitence. "Not so much; not so
much; but he is mine; I am responsible. And he is growing so big--in a
few years he would understand. ... Even now the other boys--I have done
very little for him in his life. I have been allowed to do so little,
and he isn't affectionate. It isn't me personally that he would miss...
a new gun, or a pony would more than make up _now_! But he _would_
care!... The time would come when he would be ashamed.--I couldn't bear
my own little son to be ashamed of me, Dane!"

There was no answer to be made to that protest. Dane stared at the
ground, miserably conscious of the hopelessness of the situation. He
was determined to keep to his resolution that it should be all or
nothing between Cassandra and himself, yet the prospect of parting was
intolerable.

"Are you thinking entirely of the boy?" he asked slowly, after a pause.
"Your husband? Doesn't he enter into your calculations?"

Cassandra's face hardened.

"No," she said coldly. "I am not thinking of Bernard. If there were
only Bernard to consider, it would be different. Bernard has not kept
his promise to love and cherish me all his life. I am a live woman, and
he treats me like a machine. A man like that has no right to a wife.
If I left him, it would open his eyes to his own selfishness, and do him
good.