. She returned to the couch and threw herself face
down. She lay moaning and tearing the cushions with her fingers.

He had gone away. He had beaten her not because he loved. He hated her.
And he had taken himself away from her. She understood. He no longer
wanted her. He had laughed and tried to kill her.

With a scream she rushed into his bedroom and threw herself against the
unused pillows. Her arms struck at them. She began to talk aloud in the
language she knew.

"Gone away, gone away," she cried. "I am yours and you gone away."

But words were too involved. She beat at the pillows and screamed. When
he came back she would kill him. While he sat in his chair writing she
would creep close and drive a knife. That was what would happen to him
because he no longer loved her and because he had beaten her to say
goodbye.

It was day outside. When it grew dark again he would come back. She
would wait, but not as before. She was no longer his.

In her room Rita bathed herself and searched for her old clothes. She
found them hidden--the wide dress with red and yellow stripes, the many
blue and scarlet petticoats that she had worn when he brought her home
from the caravan; the long black earrings, the green and orange shawl
for her head. She put these on. They hid the vivid marks on her body.

Dressed in her gypsy clothes she came into the room again. It would be
long to wait. But darkness would come and then he would open the door
again. She lay down on the couch and sighed.

[Illustration: Seventh Drawing]

[VII]

Mallare, wrapped in a heavy overcoat, his hands in thick gloves, walked
from his door into the street. The cold straightened him. The deserted
night mirrored itself in a thin coating of snow that overlay the
roof-tops.

"They sleep," he thought. His head bent toward the wind. "The streets
are empty. The night is mine. I must think of what has happened. There
is something inexplicable in what has happened. My hands fought with a
phantom. That, of course, is nonsense.

"How do I know my hands fought? Merely because I remember them
striking. Yet that may have been an illusion too! Then why are my hands
tired? Why do my arms ache? Another illusion, of course. Logic is
independent of truth. Logic is the persuasive repetition of ideas by
which man hypnotizes himself. I must beware of logic. It will but tie me
hopelessly to hallucination. I must think without evidence. I do not
know anything