life not to
want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes
had he stabbed her.

"So much that I'm going mad. There's no other end to it. It's been
coming on for two years--all the time I've been away from Dinwiddie I've
been fighting it."

She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he
turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could
not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was
like a woman of marble.

"You're too good for me, that's the trouble. You've been too good for me
from the beginning," he said.

Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at
her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins.

"I must pack my things," she said suddenly. "Will you engage my berth
back to Dinwiddie for to-night?"

He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, "I shan't go down
again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the
train with me."

At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand
on the knob. "Won't you let me do even that?" he asked, and his voice
sounded so like Harry's that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so
small a one--all points seemed to her so small--that her will died down
and she yielded without protest. What did it matter--what did anything
matter to her now?

"I'll send up your luncheon," he added almost gratefully. "You will be
ill if you don't eat something."

"No, please don't. I am not hungry," she answered, and then he went out
softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with
her anguish--and her packing.

Without turning in her chair, without taking off her hat, from which she
had drawn the pins, she sat there like a woman in whom the spirit has
been suddenly stricken. Beyond the window the perfect day, with its
haunting reminder of the spring, was lengthening slowly into afternoon,
and through the slant sunbeams the same gay crowd passed in streams on
the pavements. On the roof of one of the opposite houses a flag was
flying, and it seemed to her that the sight of that flag waving under
the blue sky was bound up forever with the intolerable pain in her
heart. And with that strange passivity of the nerves which nature
mercifully sends to those who have learned submission to suffering, to
those whose strength is the strength, not of resistance, but of
endurance, she felt that as long