e when that would be better
than this blankness, this utter and final exclusion from his life! He
had been cruel to her, unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and
had been so, perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be
free. But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humble herself
still farther than he had humbled her--she was ready to do anything, if
only she might see him once again.

She leaned her aching head on her hands and pondered. Do anything? But
what could she do? Nothing that should hurt him, interfere with his
liberty, be false to the spirit of their pact: on that she was more than
ever resolved. She had made a bargain, and she meant to stick to it, not
for any abstract reason, but simply because she happened to love him in
that way. Yes--but to see him again, only once!

Suddenly she remembered what Strefford had said about Nelson Vanderlyn
and his wife. "Why should two people who've just done each other the
best turn they could behave like sworn enemies ever after?" If in
offering Nick his freedom she had indeed done him such a service as
that, perhaps he no longer hated her, would no longer be unwilling
to see her.... At any rate, why should she not write to him on that
assumption, write in a spirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that
they should meet and "settle things"? The business-like word "settle"
(how she hated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs
upon his liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern, too
free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understand and accept
such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford was right; it was
something to have rid human relations of hypocrisy, even if, in the
process, so many exquisite things seemed somehow to have been torn away
with it....

She ran up to her room, scribbled a note, and hurried with it through
the rain and darkness to the post-box at the corner. As she returned
through the empty street she had an odd feeling that it was not
empty--that perhaps Nick was already there, somewhere near her in the
night, about to follow her to the door, enter the house, go up with
her to her bedroom in the old way. It was strange how close he had been
brought by the mere fact of her having written that little note to him!

In the bedroom, Geordie lay in his crib in ruddy slumber, and she blew
out the candle and undressed softly for fear of waking him.

Nick Lansing, the next day, received Su