ut for your future?" he said at last.

"No one shall look out for it in the way you mean. I'd rather never see
you again--"

He gave her a baffled stare. "Oh, damn it--if that's the way you feel!"
He turned and flung away toward the door.

She stood motionless where he left her, every nerve strung to the
highest pitch of watchfulness. As she stood there, the scene about her
stamped itself on her brain with the sharpest precision. She was aware
of the fading of the summer light outside, of the movements of her maid,
who was laying out her dinner-dress in the room beyond, and of the fact
that the tea-roses on her writing-table, shaken by Van Degen's tread,
were dropping their petals over Ralph's letter, and down on the crumpled
telegram which she could see through the trellised sides of the
scrap-basket.

In another moment Van Degen would be gone. Worse yet, while he wavered
in the doorway the Shallums and Chelles, after vainly awaiting her,
might dash back from the Bois and break in on them. These and other
chances rose before her, urging her to action; but she held fast,
immovable, unwavering, a proud yet plaintive image of renunciation.

Van Degen's hand was on the door. He half-opened it and then turned
back.

"That's all you've got to say, then?"

"That's all."

He jerked the door open and passed out. She saw him stop in the
ante-room to pick up his hat and stick, his heavy figure silhouetted
against the glare of the wall-lights. A ray of the same light fell
on her where she stood in the unlit sitting-room, and her reflection
bloomed out like a flower from the mirror that faced her. She looked
at the image and waited. Van Degen put his hat on his head and slowly
opened the door into the outer hall. Then he turned abruptly, his bulk
eclipsing her reflection as he plunged back into the room and came up to
her.

"I'll do anything you say. Undine; I'll do anything in God's world to
keep you!"

She turned her eyes from the mirror and let them rest on his face, which
looked as small and withered as an old man's, with a lower lip that
trembled queerly....

XXI

The spring in New York proceeded through more than its usual extremes of
temperature to the threshold of a sultry June.

Ralph Marvell, wearily bent to his task, felt the fantastic humours of
the weather as only one more incoherence in the general chaos of his
case. It was strange enough, after four years of marriage, to find
himself again in h