tly, almost sinister unreality.
Its stark immaculateness lay like a chill, ironic hand on their distress.
It made mock of their unhappiness. It divested them of their humanity.
The nauseating sweetness that still lingered in the sterilized air was
like incense offered up on the grotesque sacrificial altar that stood
bare and brutal beneath the glass-domed roof.

And now Robert saw Francey's face. It was white and pinched and
unfamiliar, as though all her humour and whimsical laughter and
loving-kindness had been twisted awry in a bitter fight with pain. But
he knew her eyes of old. Long ago he had seen them with the same burning
deadly anger. And he knew that it was all over. Their patient
antagonism had come to grips at last over the bodies of their suffering
love for one another.

Even then she held back.

"You don't know how hard life can be. It was hard for her----" But at
that he burst out laughing, and she added quickly, reading his thought:
"Nothing that you've gone through is of any use if it hasn't taught you
pity."

"Your pity would take a half-dead rat from a terrier."

"You have no right to judge," she persisted.

He smiled with white lips.

"Oh, yes, I have! We all have. We condemn men to prison--to death."

"You do believe in God," she said bitterly. "You believe in yourself."

"It comes to this, Francey, doesn't it? You're through with me? You
don't care any more?"

Her eyes narrowed with a kind of desperate humour. It was as though for
a moment she had regained her old vision of him--a sad queer little boy.

"You say that because you want to shirk the truth. You're almost
glad--presently you will be very glad. You never did want to care--not
from the first. Caring got in your way. You will be free now." She
waited, and then added very quietly, without anger: "I love you. I dare
say I always shall--but I couldn't live with you--it would break my heart
if we should come to hate one another. Don't think any more about it.
I'll have gone to-morrow, and I'll try to arrange not to come back till
you're through. It will be all right."

"Francey, it's such a foolish thing to quarrel about."

"It's everything," she said simply.

She turned to go. Even then he could have stopped her. He could have
said: "Francey, Christine died this morning!" and their sad enmity might
have melted in grief and pity. But what she had said was true. It was
everything. And his reason, his w