hey had left an address--but, of course, they haven't.
I'll have to track them down. It won't be so difficult." A spark of
gaiety lit up her serious eyes. "I'll find Gertie lying on her back in
the Sistine Chapel. She'll scorn the mirrors."

"You can't leave your work like that."

"The hospital people have been awfully decent about it."

"You told them----?"

"I told them I had urgent, personal business."

"You told them a lie, then?"

(Steady. Steady. But it was too late. His only hope lay in her
understanding--her pity.)

"It wasn't a lie. My friends are my business."

"Your friends!" he echoed.

There was silence between them. She was controlled enough not to answer.
It would have been better if she had returned taunt for taunt so that at
last in the white heat of conflict his prison might have melted and let
him free. But there followed a cold, deadly interlude, in which their
antagonism hardened itself with reason and bitterness. He went and stood
by the window looking out on to the dim square. He said at last roughly,
authoritatively:

"Don't go. I don't want you to go."

(If only he could have gone on--driven the words over his set
lips--"because I'm afraid--because I'm at breaking-point--because I can't
do without you. I'm frightened of life. I've been starved in body and
heart too long. I'm frightened because Christine is hard to wake at
night--because I can't work any more.")

"I've got to," she said briefly, sternly.

He walked from the window to the door.

"You don't care. You care more for these two than you do for me. I've
lived hard and clean. I don't lie or steal. I've never thought of any
girl but you. And you put me second to a feckless thief and a----"

She stopped him. Not with a word or gesture, but with the sheer upward
blaze of a chivalrous anger. And it was not only anger. That would have
been bearable. It was sorrow, reproach, a kind of grieving bewilderment,
as though he had changed before her eyes.

"You'd--you'd better go, Robert. We're both of us out of hand. We'll
see each other to-morrow. It will be different then."

He went without a word. But on the dark stairs he stood still, leaning
back against the wall, his wet face between his hands. He said aloud:
"Oh, Francey. Francey, I can't live without you!" He would have gone
back to tell her, but he was physically at the end of everything, and at
the mercy of the power outside himself. He