me."

"I know. If it had only been I who killed him!"

"I'm just--<i>Kitty</i>!" she said, choking--"as bad as bad can be. But I
couldn't have done what Mary Lyster did."

"Kitty--for God's sake!"

"Oh, I know it," she said, almost with triumph--"now I <i>know</i> it. I
determined to know--and I got people in Venice to find out. She sent the
message--that told him where I was--and I know the man who took it. I
suppose it would be pathetic if I sent her word that I had forgiven her.
But I <i>haven't</i>!"

Ashe cried out that it was wholly and utterly inconceivable.

[Illustration: "HE DREW SOME CHAIRS TOGETHER BEFORE THE FIRE"]

"Oh no!--she hated me because I had robbed her of Geoffrey. I had killed
her life, I suppose--she killed mine. It was what I deserved, of
course; only just at that moment--If there is a God, William, how could
He have let it happen so?"

The tears choked her. He left his seat, and, kneeling beside her, he
raised her in his arms, while she murmured broken and anguished
confessions.

"I was so weak--and frightened. And <i>he</i> said, it was no good trying to
go back to you. Everybody knew I had gone to Verona--and he had followed
me--No one would ever believe--And he wouldn't go--wouldn't leave me. It
would be mere cruelty and desertion, he said. My real life was--with
him. And I seemed--paralyzed. Who <i>had</i> sent that message? It never
occurred to me--I felt as if some demon held me--and I couldn't
escape--"

And again the sighs and tears, which wrung his heart--with which his own
mingled. He tried to comfort her; but what comfort could there be? They
had been the victims of a crime as hideous as any murder; and
yet--behind the crime--there stretched back into the past the
preparations and antecedents by which they themselves, alack, had
contributed to their own undoing. Had they not both trifled with the
mysterious test of life--he no less than she? And out of the dark had
come the axe-stroke that ends weakness, and crushes the unsteeled,
inconstant will.

* * * * *

After long silence, she began to talk in a rambling, delirious way of
her months in Bosnia. She spoke of the <i>cold</i>--of the high mountain
loneliness--of the terrible sights she had seen--till he drew her,
shuddering, closer into his arms. And yet there was that in her talk
which amazed him; flashes of insight, of profound and passionate
experience, which seemed to fashion her