ften?"

The quiet room seemed to resound with the long reverberations of her
question. She looked away from him, and he released her and stood up.

"I don't know what happens to other men. Such a thing never happened to
me..."

She turned her eyes back to his face. She felt like a traveller on a
giddy path between a cliff and a precipice: there was nothing for it now
but to go on.

"Had it...had it begun...before you met her in Paris?"

"No; a thousand times no! I've told you the facts as they were."

"All the facts?"

He turned abruptly. "What do you mean?"

Her throat was dry and the loud pulses drummed in her temples.

"I mean--about her...Perhaps you knew...knew things about
her...beforehand."

She stopped. The room had grown profoundly still. A log dropped to the
hearth and broke there in a hissing shower.

Darrow spoke in a clear voice. "I knew nothing, absolutely nothing," he
said.

She had the answer to her inmost doubt--to her last shameful unavowed
hope. She sat powerless under her woe.

He walked to the fireplace and pushed back the broken log with his foot.
A flame shot out of it, and in the upward glare she saw his pale face,
stern with misery.

"Is that all?" he asked.

She made a slight sign with her head and he came slowly back to her.
"Then is this to be good-bye?"

Again she signed a faint assent, and he made no effort to touch her or
draw nearer. "You understand that I sha'n't come back?"

He was looking at her, and she tried to return his look, but her eyes
were blind with tears, and in dread of his seeing them she got up and
walked away. He did not follow her, and she stood with her back to him,
staring at a bowl of carnations on a little table strewn with books. Her
tears magnified everything she looked at, and the streaked petals of the
carnations, their fringed edges and frail curled stamens, pressed upon
her, huge and vivid. She noticed among the books a volume of verse he
had sent her from England, and tried to remember whether it was before
or after...

She felt that he was waiting for her to speak, and at last she turned to
him. "I shall see you to-morrow before you go..."

He made no answer.

She moved toward the door and he held it open for her. She saw his hand
on the door, and his seal ring in its setting of twisted silver; and the
sense of the end of all things came to her.

They walked down the drawing-rooms, between the shadowy reflections of
screens and ca