lost the real love, and this brightness that she
clung to darkened for her. He looked at her, steadily, gloomily,
ashamed of what she had made him say, yet too sunken in his own pain,
too indifferent to hers, to unsay it. And in her dispossession she did
not dare make manifest the severance that she saw. He did not care for
her, but she could not tell him so; she could not tell him to go. With
horrid sickness of heart she made a feint that hid her knowledge.

'What you say is not true. Franklin does not love her. I know him
through and through. I am the great love of his life; even in his letter
to me, here, he tells me that I am.'

'Well, since you've thrown him over, he can console himself, I hope.'

'You do not understand, Gerald. I am disappointed--in both my friends.
It is an ugly thing that has happened. You feel it so; and so do I.'

He turned and began to walk on again. And still it lay with her to speak
the words that would make truth manifest. She could not utter them; she
could not, now, think. All that she knew was the dense, suffocating
fear.

Suddenly she stopped, put her hands on her heart, then covered her eyes.
'I am ill; I feel very ill,' she said. It was true. She did feel very
ill. She went to the bank at the side of the road and sank down on it.
Gerald had supported her; she had dimly been aware of the bitter joy of
feeling his arm around her, and the joy of it slid away like a snake,
leaving poison behind. He stood above her, alarmed and pitying.

'Althea--shall I go and get some one? I am so awfully sorry--so
frightfully sorry,' he repeated.

She shook her head, sitting there, her face in her hands and her elbows
on her knees. And in her great weakness an unbelievable thing happened
to her. She began to cry piteously, and she sobbed: 'O Gerald--don't be
unkind to me! don't be cruel! don't hurt me! O Gerald--love me--please
love me!' The barriers of her pride, of her thought, were down, and,
like the flowing of blood from an open wound, the truth gushed forth.

For a moment Gerald was absolutely silent. It was a tense, a stricken
silence, and she felt in it something of the horror that the showing of
a fatal wound might give. Then he knelt beside her; he took her hand; he
put his arm around her. 'Althea, what a brute--what a brute I've been.
Forgive me.' It was for something else than his harsh words that he was
asking her forgiveness. He passed hurriedly from that further, that
inevitable