t with a serenity I had never seen before
in her face. "You love me with your brain. With your soul if you like. I
_know_, my poor bleeding Stephen!--Aren't those tears there? Don't mind
my seeing them, Stephen.... Poor dear! Poor dear!.... You love _them_
with your inmost heart. Why should you mind that I see you do?... All my
life I've been wrong, Stephen, and now I know too late. It's the things
we own we love, the things we buy with our lives.... Always I have been
hard, I've been a little hard.... Stephen, my dear, I loved you, always
I have loved you, and always I have tried to keep myself.... It's too
late.... I don't know why I am talking like this.... But you see I can
make a bargain now--it's not an impossible bargain--and save you and
save your wife and save your children----"

"But how?" I said, still doubting.

"Never mind how, Stephen. Don't ask me how now. Nothing very difficult.
Easy. But I shall write you no more letters--see you--no more. Never.
And that's why I had to come, you see, why I was able to come to you,
just to see you and say good-bye to you, and take leave of you, dear
Love that I threw away and loved too late...."

She bit her lip and faced me there, a sweet flushed living thing, with a
tear coursing down her cheek, and her mouth now firm and steady.

"You can stop this divorce?" I said, "But how, Mary?"

"No, don't ask me how. At a price. It's a bargain. No, no! Don't think
that,--a bargain with Justin, but not degrading. Don't, my dear, let the
thought of it distress you. I have to give earnests.... Never, dear,
never through all the dusty rest of life again will you and I speak
together. Never! Even if we come face to face once more--no word...."

"Mary," I said, "what is it you have to do? You speak as if---- What is
it Justin demands?"

"No! do not ask me that.... Tell me--you see we've so much to talk
about, Stephen--tell me of all you are going to do. Everything. Because
I've got to make a great vow of renunciation--of you. Not to think
again--not even to think of you again.... No, no. I'm not even to look
for you in the papers any more. There's to be no tricks this time. And
so you see I want to fill up my mind with you. To store myself with you.
Tell me your work is worth it--that it's not like the work of everyone.
Tell me, Stephen--_that_. I want to believe that--tremendously. Don't be
modest now. That will be cruel. I want to believe that I am at last to
do something th