"

"No," said the girl with quick, indrawn breath.

He dashed the back of his hand across his wet eyelids. His lips were
growing numb, and he bungled over the monosyllable "Why?"

"I do not like you," she answered quietly.

"God! Oh! God, what is there left?"

She did not appear to hear the heart-break in his voice; she stood
like one wrapped in sombre thought; no blaze, no tear, nothing in
her eyes; no hardness, no tenderness about her mouth. The wind was
blowing her cloak aside, and the only visible human life in her
whole body was once when he spoke the muscles of her brown arm
seemed to contract.

"But, darling, you are mine--_mine_--we are husband and wife! Oh,
heaven, you _must_ love me, and you _must_ come to me again."

"You cannot _make_ me come," said the icy voice, "neither church,
nor law, nor even"--and the vice softened--"nor even love can make
a slave of a red girl."

"Heaven forbid it," he faltered. "No, Christie, I will never claim
you without your love. What reunion would that be? But oh, Christie,
you are lying to me, you are lying to yourself, you are lying to
heaven."

She did not move. If only he could touch her he felt as sure of her
yielding as he felt sure there was a hereafter. The memory of the
times when he had but to lay his hand on her hair to call a most
passionate response from her filled his heart with a torture that
choked all words before they reached his lips; at the thought of
those days he forgot she was unapproachable, forgot how forbidding
were her eyes, how stony her lips. Flinging himself forward, his
knee on the chair at her side, his face pressed hardly in the folds
of the cloak on her shoulder, he clasped his arms about her with a
boyish petulance, saying, "Christie, Christie, my little girl wife,
I love you, I love you, and you are killing me."

She quivered from head to foot as his fair, wavy hair brushed her
neck, his despairing face sank lower until his cheek, hot as fire,
rested on the cool, olive flesh of her arm. A warm moisture oozed up
through her skin, and as he felt its glow he looked up. Her teeth,
white and cold, were locked over her under lip, and her eyes were
as gray stones.

Not murderers alone know the agony of a death sentence.

"Is it all useless? all useless, dear?" he said, with lips starving
for hers.

"All useless," she repeated. "I have no love for you now. You
forfeited me and my heart months ago, when you said _those two
words_."