turned to pick it up, but it
was already in Cliffe's hand. She held out hers, threateningly.

"I think not." He put it in his pocket. "Here is Federigo. Good-night."

It was quite dark when Kitty reached home. She groped her way up-stairs
and opened the door of the <i>salon</i>. So weary was she that she dropped
into the first chair, not seeing at first that any one was in the room.
Then she caught sight of a brown-paper parcel, apparently just
unfastened, on the table, and within it three books, of similar shape
and size. A movement startled her.

"William!"

Ashe rose slowly from the deep chair in which he had been sitting. His
aspect seemed to her terrified eyes utterly and wholly changed. In his
hand he held a book like those on the table, and a paper-cutter. His
face expressed the remote abstraction of a man who has been wrestling
his way through some hard contest of the mind.

She ran to him. She wound her arms round him.

"William, William! I didn't mean any harm! I didn't! Oh, I have been so
miserable! I tried to stop it--I did all I could. I have hardly slept at
all--since we talked--you remember? Oh, William, look at me! Don't be
angry with me!"

Ashe disengaged himself.

"I have asked Blanche to pack for me to-night, Kitty. I go home by the
early train to-morrow."

"Home!"

She stood petrified; then a light flashed into her face.

"You'll buy it all up? You'll stop it, William?"

Ashe drew himself together.

"I am going home," he said, with slow decision, "to place my resignation
in the hands of Lord Parham."

XXI

Kitty fell back in silence, staring at William. She loosened her mantle
and threw it off, then she sat down in a chair near the wood fire, and
bent over it, shivering.

"Of course you didn't mean that, William?" she said, at last.

Ashe turned.

"I should not have said it unless I had meant every word of it. It is,
of course, the only thing to be done."

Kitty looked at him miserably. "But you <i>can't</i> mean that--that you'll
resign because of that book?"

She pulled it towards her and turned over the pages with a hand that
trembled. "That would be too foolish!"

Ashe made no reply. He was standing before the fire, with his hands in
his pockets, and a face half absent, half ironical, as though his mind
followed the sequences of a far distant future.

"William!" She caught the sleeve of his coat with a little cry. "I wrote
that book because I thought it would