e. From to-night I've got to build on ruins. Perhaps
you'll say that's impossible. It isn't. I mean to do it. I'm going to do
it. But I've got to build in freedom."

His eyes shone as he said the last words. They were suddenly the eyes
not of a man crushed but of a man released.

She felt a pang of deadly cold at her heart.

"In--freedom?" she almost whispered.

She had believed that the failure of all her hopes, the failure before
the world of which she no longer dared to cherish any lingering doubt,
had completely overwhelmed her.

In this moment she knew it had not been so, for abruptly she saw a void
opening in her life, under her feet, as it were. And she knew that till
this moment even in the midst of ruin she had been standing on firm
ground.

"In freedom!" she said again. "What--what do you mean?"

He was silent. A change had come into his face, a faint and dawning look
of surprise.

"What do you mean?" she repeated.

And now there was a sharp edge to her voice.

"That I must take back the complete artistic freedom which I have never
had since we married, that I must have it as I had it before I ever saw
you."

She got slowly up from the sofa.

"Is that--all you mean?" she said.

"All! Isn't it enough?"

"But is it all? I want to know--I must know!"

The look in her face startled him. Never before had he seen her look
like that. Never had he dreamed that she could look like that. It was as
if womanhood surged up in her. Her face was distorted, was almost ugly.
The features seemed suddenly sharpened, almost horribly salient. But her
eyes held an expression of anxiety, of hunger, of something else that
went to his heart. He dropped his hand from the piano and moved nearer
to her.

"Is that all you meant by freedom?"

"Yes."

She sighed and went forward against him.

"Did you think--do you care?" he stammered.

All the dominating force had suddenly departed from him. But he put his
arms around her.

"Do you care for the man who has failed?"

"Yes, yes!"

She put her arms slowly, almost feebly, round his neck.

"Yes, yes, yes!"

She kept on repeating the word, breathing it against his cheek,
breathing it against his lips, till his lips stifled it on hers.

At last she took her lips away. Their eyes almost touched as she gazed
into his, and said:

"It was always the man. Perhaps I didn't know it, but it was--the man,
not the triumph."

CHAPTER XXXVIII

"And you really