ght. I want what forgiveness I can wring from you.
I want what understanding I can force from you. That's all."

She thought, standing there, still and tall, her arms hanging, her
eyes wide and secret, as he had remembered them in her thin, changed,
so much more expressive face.

"Very well," she said, "you may come. I'll hear you out." She gave him
the address and named an afternoon hour. "Good-night."

It was a graceful and dignified dismissal. Prosper bit his lip, bowed
and left her.

As the door closed upon her, he knew that it had closed upon the only
real and vivid presence in his life. War had burnt away his glittering,
clever frivolity. Betty was the adventure, Betty was the tinsel; Joan
was the grave, predestined woman of his man. For the first time in his
life he found himself face to face with the cleanness of despair.

CHAPTER VII

AFTERMATH

Joan waited for Prosper on the appointed afternoon. There was a fire
on her hearth and a March snow-squall tapped against the window panes.
The crackle of the logs inside and that eerie, light sound outside
were so associated with Prosper that, even before he came, Joan,
sitting on one side of the hearth, closed her eyes and felt that he
must be opposite to her in his red-lacquered chair, his long legs
stuck out in front, his amused and greedy eyes veiled by a cloud of
cigarette smoke.

Since she had seen him at the theater, she had been suffering from
sleeplessness. At night she would go over and over the details of
their intercourse, seeing them, feeling them, living them in the light
of later knowledge, till the torment was hardly to be borne. Three
days and nights of this inner activity had brought back that sharp
line between her brows and the bitter tightening of her lips.

This afternoon she was white with suspense. Her dread of the impending
interview was like a physical illness. She sat in a high-backed chair,
hands along the arms, head resting back, eyes half-closed, in that
perfect stillness of which the animal and the savage are alone
entirely capable. There were many gifts that Joan had brought from the
seventeen years on Lone River. This grave immobility was one. She was
very carefully dressed in a gown that accentuated her height and
dignity. And she wore a few jewels. She wanted, pitifully enough, to
mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had
drawn on his sled up the canyon trail. If he expected to force her