hould need them?"

"I need no one except you. I don't want to see them. I don't want to
hear their news. They are killing you. You seem calm, but your face! you
have never looked like this before. O, darling, it can't be what you
think it is."

He lifted her from the ground and took her in his arms again, as though
he could defy the cruel, invisible fate which had decreed their
separation.

"In any case," he said, "I won't give you back--I cannot. It is too much
to ask. You are mine--you were never his--never. God is not unjust, and
this is unjust. As for other people and outside opinion, they have not
mattered to me at any time, and least of all can they matter now. I
won't give you back."

She held him closer, already feeling, in spite of his words, the first
agony of their inevitable farewell.

"You love me!" she said, "you must never leave me. Kiss me, and promise
me that you will never leave me."

Grief and horror had broken down every barrier of reserve between them.
The pent-up passion on his side, the intense unconscious tenderness on
hers seemed to meet and blend in the one consuming thought that they
belonged to each other--that, in the awful struggle between the force of
circumstances and the force of life--they might have to part.

"Why should we two matter in so large a world?" she cried. "Surely we
need not suffer so much just for the discipline of our own souls? I
cannot, cannot, cannot go away. I can't live without you. I can't die
without you. I am tired of being alone. I am tired of trying to forget
you. And I have tried so hard."

Her face, from which all colour and joy and animation had departed,
seemed like a June rose dead, in all its perfection, on the tree. One
may see many such in a garden after a sudden frost.

"You mustn't leave me. They all frighten me. I have no one but you," she
continued; "God will understand. He doesn't ask any one to be alone. He
wasn't even crucified--alone. He didn't enter into Paradise--alone. Ask
me to do anything, but don't ask me to go away--to go back to Wrexham.
You are much stronger than I am. If you thought you ought to cut out
your heart by little pieces, you would do it. But you must think of me.
They may have all my money--that is all they care for. But I must have
you."

Although she made the appeal, he had resolved, in silence, long before,
that, come what might, he would not give her back. The decision rose on
the instant, without hesitation,