as much divided as though the whole world
lay between them.

At last, with an effort, she raised her eyes and saw him standing
beside her. A stifled cry escaped her. Throughout dinner, while the
Fentons had been present, he had smiled and talked much as usual, so
that the change in the man had been less noticeable. But the mask was
off now, and in repose his face showed, so worn and ravaged by grief
that Nan cried out involuntarily in pitiful dismay.

Her first impulse was to fold her arms about him, drawing that lined
and altered face against her bosom, hiding from sight the stark
bitterness of the eyes that met her own, and comforting him as only the
woman who loves a man knows how.

Then, like a black, surging flood, the memory of all that kept them
apart rushed over her and she drew back her arms, half-raised, falling
limply to her sides. He made no effort to approach her. Only his eyes
remained fixed on her, hungrily devouring every line of the beloved
face.

"Why did you come?" she asked at last. Her voice seemed to herself as
though it came from a great distance. It sounded like someone else
speaking.

"I couldn't keep away. Life without you has become one long,
unbearable hell."

He spoke with a strange, slow vehemence which seemed to hold the
aggregated bitterness and pain of all those solitary months.

A shudder ran through her slight frame. Her own agony of separation
had been measurable with his.

"But you said . . . at Tintagel . . . that we mustn't meet again. You
shouldn't have come--oh, you shouldn't have come!" she cried
tremulously.

He drew a step nearer to her.

"I _had_ to come, I'm a man--not a saint!" he answered.

She looked up swiftly, trying to read what lay behind the harsh
repression in his tones. She felt as though he were holding something
in leash--something that strained and fought against restraint.

"_I'm a man--not a saint_!" The memory of his renunciation at King
Arthur's Castle swept over her.

"Yet I once thought you--almost that, Peter," she said slowly.

But he brushed her words aside.

"Well, I'm not. When I saw you to-day at the studio . . . God! Did
you think I'd keep away? . . . Nan, did you _want_ me to?"

The leash was slipping. She trembled, aching to answer him as her
whole soul dictated, to tell him the truth--that she wanted him every
minute of the day and that life without him stretched before her like a
barren waste.

"I--we--o