e a time when you are not in my mind," she said. "I
love you as though you were my own son. I had hoped that you would be
here often, but now I see that it is right for you to go. I know that
Margaret will wait for you. Meanwhile an old woman loves you."

He kissed her and left her.

At the door through the dark room he heard her thin voice: "May God
bless you and keep you."

He went to perform his hardest task.

2

It was the harder in that for a little while he seemed to be left
absolutely alone. The room was dark save for the leaping light of the
fire in the deep stone fireplace, and as he saw Margaret standing there
waiting for him, desperately courageous, he only knew that he loved her
so badly that, for a little while, he could only stand there staring at
her, twisting his hands together, speechless.

"Well," at last she said. "Come and sit down and tell me all about it."
But her voice trembled a little and her eyes were wide, frightened,
begging him not to hurt her.

He sat down near her, before the fire, and she instinctively, as though
she knew that this was a very tremendous matter, stood away from him,
her hands clasped together against her black dress.

Suddenly now, before he spoke, he realized what it would mean to him
if she could not forgive what he had done. He had imagined it once
before--the slow withdrawal of her eyes, the gradual tightening of the
lips, the little instinctive movement away from him.

If he must go out into the world, having lost her, he thought that he
could never endure, God or no God, the long dreary years in front of
him.

At last he was brave: "Margaret--at first I want you to know that I
love you with all my heart and soul and body; that nothing that can
ever happen to me can ever alter that love--that I am yours, entirely,
always. And then I want you to know that I am not worthy to love you,
that I ought never to have asked you to love me, that I ought to have
gone away the first time that I saw you."

She made a little loving, protecting movement towards him with her hands
and then let them drop against her dress again.

"I ought never to have loved you--because--only a day or two before I
met you--I had killed Carfax, Rupert's friend."

The words as they fell seemed to him like the screams that iron bolts
give as a gate is barred.

He whispered slowly the words again: "I killed Carfax"--and then he
covered his eyes with his hands so that he might not see