a, it would be at your feet. As it is, it
rose out of its grave to salute you. It follows you now, sometimes, like
an unhappy ghost."

It was as if he had told her that his youth loved her; that she had not
gone altogether unclaimed and undesired; she had had her part in him.

Then she remembered that, if she was his youth, Laura was his manhood.

She knew that none of these things were what he had come to say.

He said it lingering in the doorway, after their good-night. He had got
to go, he said, next week to Manchuria. Brodrick was sending him.

She stood there staring at him, her haggard face white under the blow.
Her mouth opened to speak, but her voice died in her tortured throat.

He turned suddenly from her and went up the stairs. The door fell to
between them.

She groped her way about the room as if it were in darkness. When her
feet touched the fur of the tiger-skin by the hearth she flung herself
down on it. She had no thought in her brain nor any sense of
circumstance. It was as if every nerve and pulse in her body were
gathered to the one nerve and the one pulse of her heart.

At midnight she dragged herself to her bed, and lay there, stretched
out, still and passive to the torture. Every now and then tears cut
their way under her eyelids with a pricking pain. Every now and then the
burn in her arm bit deeper; but her mind remained dull to this bodily
distress. The trouble of her body, that had so possessed her when Owen
laid his hands on her, had passed. She could have judged her pain to be
wholly spiritual, its intensity so raised it, so purged it from all
passion of flesh and blood.

In the morning the glass showed her a face thinned in one night; the
skin, tightened over each high and delicate ridge of bone, had the glaze
and flush of grief; her hooded eyes stared at her, red-rimmed, dilated;
eyes where desire dies miserably of its own pain. Her body, that had
carried itself so superbly, was bowed as if under the scourging of a
lash; she held it upright only by an effort of her will. It was
incredible that it should ever have been a thing of swift and radiant
energy; incredible that its ruin should be an event of yesterday. She
lived in an order of time that was all her own, solitary, interminable,
not to be measured by any clock or sun. It was there that her undoing
was accomplished.

Yet she knew vaguely that he was to sail in six days. Every day he came
to her and dressed her burn and ban