esperation his bride had broken from him. In an instant she had put the
table between them.

Over ten feet of lamplit space, the lovers of yesteryear regarded each
other. Both were white, both trembling. The girl now suffered a brief
collapse; her face dropped into her upraised hands, through which,
presently, her voice came brokenly:

"_Go!_... Go, I beg you...."

Canning stood panting, shaken and speechless. Upon him was the last
measure of defeat. He had staked his passion and his pride in the
supreme attack, and had been crushingly repulsed. Doubt not that he read
the incredible portents in the heavens now. His face went from chalk to
leaden gray.

He drew his tongue once across his lips, and said, just articulately:

"If I go--out of this room--alone ... as God lives, you'll never see me
again."

It must have been something in Hugo's difficult voice, surely nothing in
the words, that set a chord to stirring in Cally. She took her eyes from
her hands, glanced once at his subtly distorted face. And then she stood
silent by the barrier table, looking down, knotting and unknotting her
yellow sash-ends....

That other night of humiliation in the library, which she had never been
able to forget, had risen swiftly on the wings of memory. But,
curiously, she felt no such uprush of shame now; her fury mysteriously
ebbed from her. Even in this moment, still trembling from his familiar
handling, still with the frightening sense of her life going to ruin
about her, she felt a rising pity for her prince of lovers whom time and
circumstance had brought to this....

"Perhaps," said she, out of the silence, in almost a natural tone, "I
ought to feel very--angry and--and indignant.... But I don't. I only
feel sad.... Hugo, why need there be any bitterness between us? We've
both made a mistake, that's all, and I feel it's been my fault from the
beginning. If you seem to take me--rather--lightly.... I must have
taught you to think of me that way.... And you'll soon see how--how
superficial my attraction for you was, soon forget...."

Strangely, these mild words seemed to affect Hugo more than anything
done or said before. In fact, he appeared unable to bear them. He had
checked her speech suddenly by lifting his hand, in a vague way, to his
head; and now, without a word, he turned away, walking blindly
toward the door.

She, in silence, followed his going with dark eyes that looked half
ready to weep.

By the door into