d do nothing, think of nothing, to save it.
The conjecture flashed through her: "Should I be at peace if I gave him
up?" and she remembered the desolation of the days after she had sent
him away, and understood that that hope was vain. The tears welled
through her lids and ran slowly down between her fingers.

"Good-bye," she heard him say, and his footsteps turned to the door.

She tried to raise her head, but the weight of her despair bowed it
down. She said to herself: "This is the end...he won't try to appeal to
me again..." and she remained in a sort of tranced rigidity, perceiving
without feeling the fateful lapse of the seconds. Then the cords that
bound her seemed to snap, and she lifted her head and saw him going.

"Why, he's mine--he's mine! He's no one else's!" His face was turned to
her and the look in his eyes swept away all her terrors. She no longer
understood what had prompted her senseless outcry; and the mortal
sweetness of loving him became again the one real fact in the world.

XXXIX

Anna, the next day, woke to a humiliated memory of the previous evening.

Darrow had been right in saying that their sacrifice would benefit no
one; yet she seemed dimly to discern that there were obligations not
to be tested by that standard. She owed it, at any rate, as much to his
pride as to hers to abstain from the repetition of such scenes; and
she had learned that it was beyond her power to do so while they
were together. Yet when he had given her the chance to free herself,
everything had vanished from her mind but the blind fear of losing him;
and she saw that he and she were as profoundly and inextricably bound
together as two trees with interwoven roots. For a long time she brooded
on her plight, vaguely conscious that the only escape from it must come
from some external chance. And slowly the occasion shaped itself in her
mind. It was Sophy Viner only who could save her--Sophy Viner only who
could give her back her lost serenity. She would seek the girl out and
tell her that she had given Darrow up; and that step once taken there
would be no retracing it, and she would perforce have to go forward
alone.

Any pretext for action was a kind of anodyne, and she despatched her
maid to the Farlows' with a note asking if Miss Viner would receive her.
There was a long delay before the maid returned, and when at last she
appeared it was with a slip of paper on which an address was written,
and a verbal