till it
poured courage into her veins.

"Yes--it comes to that," she confessed.

"Then you feel as I do?"

"That you must go----?"

"That this is intolerable!"

The words struck down her last illusion, and she rose and went over to
the writing-table. "Yes--go," she said.

He stood up also, and took both her hands, not in a caress, but gravely,
almost severely.

"Listen, Justine. You must understand exactly what this means--may mean.
I am willing to go on as we are now...as long as we can...because I
love you...because I would do anything to spare you pain. But if I speak
I must say everything--I must follow this thing up to its uttermost
consequences. That's what I want to make clear to you."

Her heart sank with a foreboding of new peril. "What consequences?"

"Can't you see for yourself--when you look about this house?"

"This house----?"

He dropped her hands and took an abrupt turn across the room.

"I owe everything to her," he broke out, "all I am, all I have, all I
have been able to give you--and I must go and tell her father that
you...."

"Stop--stop!" she cried, lifting her hands as if to keep off a blow.

"No--don't make me stop. We must face it," he said doggedly.

"But this--this isn't the truth! You put it as if--almost as if----"

"Yes--don't finish.--Has it occurred to you that _he_ may think that?"
Amherst asked with a terrible laugh. But at that she recovered her
courage, as she always did when an extreme call was made on it.

"No--I don't believe it! If he _does_, it will be because you think it
yourself...." Her voice sank, and she lifted her hands and pressed them
to her temples. "And if you think it, nothing matters...one way or the
other...." She paused, and her voice regained its strength. "That is
what I must face before you go: what _you_ think, what _you_ believe of
me. You've never told me that."

Amherst, at the challenge, remained silent, while a slow red crept to
his cheek-bones.

"Haven't I told you by--by what I've done?" he said slowly.

"No--what you've done has covered up what you thought; and I've helped
you cover it--I'm to blame too! But it was not for this that we...that
we had that half-year together...not to sink into connivance and
evasion! I don't want another hour of sham happiness. I want the truth
from you, whatever it is."

He stood motionless, staring moodily at the floor. "Don't you see that's
my misery--that I don't know myself?"

"You don't