r any more and live."

He stood looking at her, but she turned her head away with a petulant
gesture of repulsion; and lest her eyes might feel the call of his she
covered them with her hands. Her hopelessness, her loathing of him
enclosed her like a wall of ice.

"So! The dream's over!" he said. "'This woman to this man'! What a
farce--what a tragedy!"

When she looked up again he had gone and the door between their rooms was
shut.

The moon no longer lit the high window. With Knight's going darkness
fell.

CHAPTER XX

THE PLAN

Annesley sat as Knight had left her for a long time--minutes, perhaps, or
hours. But at last she was very tired and very cold, so tired that she
threw herself weakly on the bed, in her dressing-gown, because she
couldn't sit up. All through the rest of the dark hours she lay
shivering, and did not even trouble to roll herself in the warm down
coverlet spread lightly over the bed.

It seemed right, somehow, that she should be cold and miserable
physically. She did not care or wish to be comfortable.

Over and over again she asked herself: "What shall I do? What is to
become of me--of both of us?" She tried to pray, but her heart was too
hard toward the man who had trampled on her life and love for his own
cruel purposes. It seemed to her that God would not hear a prayer sent
up in such a mood; yet she did not want to soften her heart toward the
sinner.

Because it had been so full of forgiveness before he poisoned the chalice
with the bitter stream of confession, it was the more impossible to
forgive now. It even seemed to Annesley that it would be monstrous to
forgive, in the ordinary, human sense of the word, a man who was a living
lie.

If there were room for thanksgiving in her wretchedness, it lay in the
fact that her love had died a swift and sudden death. Had she gone on
loving in spite of all, such love, she thought, must have brought death
into her soul.

She did not know how to name her husband now. Even in thinking of him she
would not call him "Knight."

What a mockery the name had been! How he must have laughed to know that
she was fool enough to believe him a knight of chivalry, who had come
like St. George to rescue her from the dragon!

She knew at last that the name he had not wished her to see in the parish
register was Michael Donaldson. That meant, she supposed, that her name
was Donaldson, too; a name he had dragged through the mire.

He pretend