between her and that door.

She looked about for other means of escape; but she knew immediately that
there was none. Her own bedroom opened off the room in which she was now
trapped; but it was a mere cubby-hole without an outer door or even a
window. On the other side of the room there was a window looking out
toward the desert; but even as her glance sought relief in that direction
she remembered that this window, of only half-sash dimensions, was nailed
into its place and was immovable. Against the dusty panes a bird-cage
hung, and she realized with an oddly ill-timed pang of sorrow that it was
empty. It was plain that the canary had died during her absence; and she
wondered if anything in all the world could seem so empty as a bird-cage
which had once had an occupant and had lost it. The sunset sky beyond that
empty cage and the uncleaned window-panes caught her glance: an infinitely
far-off drift of saffron with never a moving figure between it and the
window through which she looked.

Then all her terrors were renewed by Fectnor's voice. He had sauntered to
a small table near the middle of the room and sat down on the end of it,
after shoving a chair in Sylvia's direction.

"What's the matter with you, Sylvia?" he demanded. He scarcely seemed
angry: impatient would be the word, perhaps.

Something in his manner, rather than his words, wiped out that chasm of
time that had been placed between them. It was as if she had talked with
him yesterday. She felt hideously familiar with him--on the same mental
and moral plane with him.

"I am married," she said shortly. If she had thought she would resort to
parleying and evasions, she now had no intention of doing so. It seemed
inevitable that she should talk to Fectnor in his own language.

"I don't care anything about your marriage," he said. "A bit of church
flummery. Use your brains, Sylvia. You know that couldn't make any
difference."

"I'm not thinking about the flummery. That isn't it. It's the fact that I
love the man I married."

"All very well and good. But you know you used to love me."

"No, I never did."

"Oh, yes you did. You just forget. At any rate, you was as much to me as
you could ever be to a husband. You know you can't drop me just because
it's convenient for you to take up with somebody else. You know that's not
the way I'm built."

She had refused to use the chair he had shoved toward her. She stood
beside it a little defiantly. Now sh