ghope; but that, at the moment, seemed almost a secondary
motive compared to the deeper influences that were inexorably forcing
them apart. At any rate, she would trump up no trivial excuse for the
step she had resolved on; there should be truth, if not the whole truth,
in this last decisive hour between them.

"Yes; I am quite well--at least my body is," she said quietly. "But I am
tired, perhaps; my mind has been going round too long in the same
circle." She paused for a brief space, and then, raising her head, and
looking him straight in the eyes: "Has it not been so with you?" she
asked.

The question seemed to startle Amherst. He rose from his chair and took
a few steps toward the hearth, where a small fire was crumbling into
embers. He turned his back to it, resting an arm on the mantel-shelf;
then he said, in a somewhat unsteady tone: "I thought we had agreed not
to speak of all that again."

Justine shook her head with a fugitive half-smile. "I made no such
agreement. And besides, what is the use, when we can always hear each
other's thoughts speak, and they speak of nothing else?"

Amherst's brows darkened. "It is not so with mine," he began; but she
raised her hand with a silencing gesture.

"I know you have tried your best that it should not be so; and perhaps
you have succeeded better than I. But I am tired, horribly tired--I want
to get away from everything!"

She saw a look of pain in his eyes. He continued to lean against the
mantel-shelf, his head slightly lowered, his unseeing gaze fixed on a
remote scroll in the pattern of the carpet; then he said in a low tone:
"I can only repeat again what I have said before--that I understand why
you did what you did."

"Thank you," she answered, in the same tone.

There was another pause, for she could not trust herself to go on
speaking; and presently he asked, with a tinge of bitterness in his
voice: "That does not satisfy you?"

She hesitated. "It satisfies me as much as it does you--and no more,"
she replied at length.

He looked up hastily. "What do you mean?"

"Just what I say. We can neither of us go on living on that
understanding just at present." She rose as she spoke, and crossed over
to the hearth. "I want to go back to my nursing--to go out to Michigan,
to a town where I spent a few months the year before I first came to
Hanaford. I have friends there, and can get work easily. And you can
tell people that I was ill and needed a change."