e staggered to her feet.

"Take me away!" she said, in a dead voice, to Lucilla van Tromp. "Help
me! Take me away! I can't bear any more!" Leaning on Miss Lucilla's arm,
she advanced a step and paused before Diane, who stood wide-eyed, and
awe-struck rather than amazed, at the magnitude of this desertion. "May
God forgive you, Diane," she said, quietly, passing on again. "I try to
do so; but it's hard."

While Derek's eyes were riveted on Diane, she stood staring vacantly at
the empty doorway through which Mrs. Eveleth and Miss Lucilla had passed
on their way up-stairs. This abandonment was so far outside the range of
what she had considered possible that there seemed to be no avenues to
her intelligence through which the conviction of it could be brought
home. She gazed as though her own vision were at fault, as though her
powers of comprehension had failed her.

[Illustration: DRAWN BY FRANK CRAIG
"I'VE NO ONE TO SPEAK A WORD FOR ME BUT YOU"]

Derek, on his part, watched her, with the fascination with which we
watch a man performing some strange feat of skill--from whom first one
support, and then another, and then another, falls away, until he is
left with nothing to uphold him, perilously, frightfully alone.

When at length the knowledge of what had occurred came over her, Diane
looked round the familiar room, as though to bring her senses back out
of the realm of the incredible. When her eyes rested on him it was
simply to include him among the common facts of earth after this
excursion into the impossible. She said nothing, and her face was blank;
but the little gesture of the hands--the little limp French gesture: the
sudden lift, the sudden drop, the soft, tired sound, as the arms fell
against the sides--implied fatality, finality, inexplicability, and an
infinite weariness of created things.

XIV

"Do you think he did--shoot himself?"

They continued to stand staring into each other's eyes--the width of the
room between them. A red azalea on the long mahogany table, strewn with
books, separated them by its fierce splash of color. The apathy of
Diane's voice was not that of worn-out emotion, but of emotion which
finds no adequate tones. The very way in which her inquiry ignored all
other subjects between them had its poignancy.

"What do _you_ think?"

"Oh, I suppose he did. Every one says so; then why shouldn't it be true?
If it were, it would only be of a piece with all the rest."

"I rem