y
of bitterness, "I am different now for a while, but it would not last. I
am very tired, but after I have rested--"

"What would not last?" he broke in, as she hesitated over her unfinished
sentence.

For a long pause she waited, searching in vain, he saw, for some phrase
which might describe the thing she had not as yet thought out clearly in
her own dazed mind. Then, at last, she spoke almost in a whisper, "the
freedom."

The word gave him a sudden shock of gladness. "Then you are free
to-day--you feel it now?"

She raised her hand, pushing back her faded hair, as if she would look
more closely at an object which rose but dimly before her eyes.

"I want you to know all--everything," she went on slowly, "I want you to
understand how low I sank--to what fearful places I came in the end. At
first it was merely discontent, and I felt that it was only happiness I
wanted. I loved him--for a time, I think, I really loved him--you know
whom I mean--but at last, when I began to weary him, when he knew what I
took, he cursed me and left me alone in the street one night. Then a
devil was let loose within me--I wanted hell, and I went
further--further."

Her voice was still lifeless, but while she spoke he felt his teeth bite
into his lips with a force which stung him to the consciousness of what
she said. There awoke in him a triumph, almost a glory in the rage he
felt, and he knew now why men had always believed in a hell--why they
had even come at last to hope for it.

"I never meant to come back," she began again, after a pause in which
the tumult of his feeling seemed to fill the air with violence, "but I
had reached the end of wretchedness, I was tired and hungry, and nothing
that happened really mattered. If you had told me to go away I don't
think that I should have cared. I meant, in that case, to sell my coat
for a bottle of brandy, and to put an end to it all while I had the
courage of drink."

Her bent disordered head trembled slightly, but she appeared to him to
have passed in her misery beyond the bounds where any human sympathy
could be of use. She was no longer his wife, nor he her husband; she was
no longer even a fellow mortal between whom and himself there might be
some common ground of understanding. Absolutely alone and
unapproachable, he knew that she had reached the ultimate desolation of
her soul.

"It was because you did not send me away that I have told you," she said
quietly. "It is becaus