ak
sanely, while he held off the sense of chaos under which his brain
staggered--"but, Anne, after all these years, you can't throw overboard
your faith in me without giving me a chance to be heard."

She laughed bitterly, and of course that was hysteria, but to the man it
seemed only derision.

"Until three minutes ago," she said, "I would have staked my life on my
faith in you ... I did just about do it.... Now, I'm afraid ... there
isn't any left ... to throw away."

"If you ever had any," he declared--and he, too, spoke under a stress
that gave an unaccustomed hardness to his voice, "there should be some
still. The answer you held me to answers nothing. It gives no
reason--no explanation."

"The reasons ... don't count for much. Yes means yes. It means years of
deceit and lies to me.... Good-bye."

Boone Wellver turned and walked to the door. His eyes, fixed ahead, saw
nothing. As he went, he collided with a table and paused, looking at it
with a dazed sense of injury. On the threshold he halted to speak in a
voice which was queer and uncommanded.

"You are sending me away," he said, "without a chance. I still have
faith in you ... unless it's a false faith, you'll send for me to come
back ... and give me that chance.... Until you do, I won't ask it ... or
try to see you."

The girl stood looking past him in a sort of trance. "Good-bye," she
repeated, and he took up his coat and hat and went out.

For a little while after he had gone Anne Masters remained staring with
a stunned and transfixed immobility at the empty frame of the door
through which he had gone; a frame it seemed to her out of which had
suddenly been torn the picture of her life, leaving a tattered canvas.
She shivered violently; then she, too, started toward the door, swayed
unsteadily, and fell insensible.

* * * * *

A measure before the lower house of the General Assembly had split it so
evenly that when the roll call came on the vote, a deadlock was
predicted and one absentee might bring defeat to his cause. After each
adjournment noses were jealously counted, and the falling gavel, calling
each session to order, found Boone in his seat with a face that sought
to mask its misery behind a stony expressionlessness. It was a deadly
sober face with eyes that wandered often into abstraction, so that men
who had seen it heretofore ready of smile commented on the change, yet
hesitated to question one so palpab