the drawer of the desk, took out a sheet of paper
and an envelope, and pushed them toward her. "Do you want a stamp too?"
he asked.

She nodded, and he gave her the stamp. As he did so she felt that he was
looking at her intently, and she knew that the candle light flickering
up on her white face must be distorting her swollen features and
exaggerating the dark rings about her eyes. She snatched up the paper,
her reassurance dissolving under his pitiless gaze, in which she seemed
to read the grim perception of her state, and the ironic recollection
of the day when, in that very room, he had offered to compel Harney to
marry her. His look seemed to say that he knew she had taken the paper
to write to her lover, who had left her as he had warned her she would
be left. She remembered the scorn with which she had turned from him
that day, and knew, if he guessed the truth, what a list of old scores
it must settle. She turned and fled upstairs; but when she got back to
her room all the words that had been waiting had vanished....

If she could have gone to Harney it would have been different; she would
only have had to show herself to let his memories speak for her. But
she had no money left, and there was no one from whom she could have
borrowed enough for such a journey. There was nothing to do but to
write, and await his reply. For a long time she sat bent above the blank
page; but she found nothing to say that really expressed what she was
feeling....

Harney had written that she had made it easier for him, and she was glad
it was so; she did not want to make things hard. She knew she had it in
her power to do that; she held his fate in her hands. All she had to
do was to tell him the truth; but that was the very fact that held her
back.... Her five minutes face to face with Mr. Royall had stripped her
of her last illusion, and brought her back to North Dormer's point of
view. Distinctly and pitilessly there rose before her the fate of the
girl who was married "to make things right." She had seen too many
village love-stories end in that way. Poor Rose Coles's miserable
marriage was of the number; and what good had come of it for her or
for Halston Skeff? They had hated each other from the day the minister
married them; and whenever old Mrs. Skeff had a fancy to humiliate her
daughter-in-law she had only to say: "Who'd ever think the baby's only
two? And for a seven months' child--ain't it a wonder what a size he
is?