"I said I had a request to make. This is it--that you don't leave until
you are married again. You won't have to wait long if I leave. I have
inquired and found out. A few days, a few weeks at the longest, and you
will be free. Meanwhile stay here. Everything is yours. I never owned
anything except the house, and that is yours also." For the last time he
halted; then even, distinct, came the question direct. "Will you promise
me this, Bess?" he asked.

Save once, when she had tried to interrupt, the girl had listened
through it all without a move, without a sound. Now that he was silent,
and it was her turn to speak, she still stood so, passive, waiting. Ever
in times of stress his will had dominated her will; and the present was
no exception. There was an infinity of things she might have said. A
myriad which she should have spoken, would occur to her when he was
gone. But at the present, when the opportunity was hers, there seemed
nothing to offer; nothing to gainsay. She even forgot that she was
expected to answer at all, that he had asked a question.

"Won't you promise me this one thing, Bess?" repeated the voice gently.
"I've never made a request of you before, and I probably never shall
again."

At last the girl aroused; and of a sudden she realised that her lips
were very dry and hot. She moistened them with her tongue.

"Yes, How," she said dully, "I promise."

Silence fell, a silence deathly in its significance, in its finality;
but the girl did not break it, said no more--and forever the moment, her
moment, vanished into the past.

"Thank you, Bess," acknowledged the man monotonously. Slowly, strangely
different from his usual alert certainty, he moved across the room.
"There are just a few things here I'd like to take with me," he
explained apologetically. "They'd only be in your way if I left them."

With a hand that fumbled a bit, he took down a battered telescope
satchel from a peg on the wall and began packing. He moved about slowly
here and there, his moccasined feet patting dully on the bare floor. No
one offered to assist him, no one interrupted; and in dead silence,
except for the sound he himself made, he went about his work. Into the
satchel went a few books from the shelf on the wall: an old army
greatcoat that had been Colonel William Landor's: a weather-stained cap
which had been a present likewise: a handful of fossils he had gathered
in one of his journeys to the Bad Lands: an inexp