Jerry had forgotten. She would
destroy every link between herself and the past--and pack the neat
little steamer trunk neatly--and bid these kind and gentle people
good-by--and take herself and her bitterness and her dullness back
to the class-room in the Western university town--back to the
Romance languages. The Romance languages!

She would finish it all that night, and leave as soon as possible.
There were some trinkets to destroy, and his letters from France to
burn--she would give Rosemary the rose-coloured dress--foolish,
lovely little Rosemary, whom he had loved, and who was lying now
fast asleep in the next room curled up like a kitten in the middle
of the great bed, her honey-coloured hair falling about her in a
shining mist. She swept back her own cloud of hair resolutely,
frowning at the candle-lit reflection in the mirror. Two desolate
pools in the small, pale oval of her face stared back at her--two
pools with something drowned in their lonely depths. Well, she would
drown it deeper!

The letters first; how lucky that they still used candle-light! It
would make the task much simpler--the funeral pyre already lighted.
She moved one of the tall candelabra to the desk, sitting for a long
time quite still, her chin cupped in her hands, staring down at the
bits of paper. She could smell the wall-flowers under the window as
though they were in the room--drenched in dew and moonlight, they
were reckless of their fragrance. All this peace and cleanliness and
orderly beauty--what a ghastly trick for God to have played--to have
taught her to adore them, and then to snatch them away! All about her,
warm with candle-light, lay the gracious loveliness of the little
room with its dark waxed furniture, its bright glazed chintz, its
narrow bed with the cool linen sheets smelling of lavender, and its
straight, patterned curtains--oh, that hateful, mustard-coloured den
at home, with its golden-oak day-bed!

She wrung her hands suddenly in a little hunted gesture. How could
he have left her to that, he who had sworn that he would never leave
her? In every one of those letters beneath her linked fingers he had
sworn it--in every one perjured--false half a hundred times. Pick up
any one of them at random--

"Janie, you darling stick, is 'dear Jerry' the best that you can do?
You ought to learn French! I took a perfectly ripping French kid out
to dinner last night--name's Liane, from the Varietes--and she was
calling me '