hat struggle tearing her heart
asunder?

"My poor child!" said he, and then he repeated his words, "My poor
child! It would have been better if we had never come together. We are
going to part now."

She looked at him and laughed in his face.

He did not know what this meant. Had she been simply acting a part all
along? Had she been playing a comedy part all the while he was thinking
that a great tragedy was being enacted? Or was it possible that she
was mocking him? that her laugh was the laugh of the jailer who hears a
prisoner announce his intention of walking out of his cell?

"Good-by," said he.

She fixed her eyes upon his face, then she laughed again.

He now knew what she meant by her laugh.

"Perhaps you may think that you have too firm a hold upon me to give me
a chance of parting from you," said he. "You may be right; but if you
tell me to go I shall try and obey you. But think what it means before
you tell me to leave you forever."

She did think what it meant. She looked at him, and she thought of his
passing away from her forever more. She wondered what her life would be
when he should have passed out of it. A blank? Oh, worse than a blank,
for she would have ever present with her the recollection of how he had
once stood before her as he was standing now--tall, with his brown hands
clenched, and a paleness underlying the tan of his face. "The bravest
man alive"--that was what Phyllis had called him, and Phyllis had been
right. He was a man who had fought his way single-handed through such
perils as made those who merely read about them throb with anxiety.

This was the man of whom she knew that she would ever retain a
memory--this was the man whom she was ready to send back to the
uttermost ends of the earth.

And this was to be the reward of his devotion to her! What was she
that she could do this thing? What was she that she should refrain from
sacrificing herself for him? She had known women who had sacrificed
themselves to men--such men! Wretched things! Not like that man of men
who stood before her with such a look on his face as it had worn, she
knew, in the most desperate moments of his life, when the next moment
might bring death to him--death from an arrow--from a wild beast--from a
hurricane.

What could she do?

She did nothing.

She made no effort to save herself.

If he had put his arms about her and had carried her away from her
husband's house to the uttermost ends of the