erests,
fighting--and not ungenerously--to save her from the ravening
consequences of her indiscretion!

The bald truth is, he was hardly a responsible agent: distracted by the
ravings of an ego mutinous in the shadow of annihilation, as well as by
contemplation of the girl's wretched plight, he saw all things in
distorted perspective. He had his being in a nightmare world of
frightful, insane realities. He could have conceived of nothing too
terrible and preposterous to seem reasonable and right....

The last trace of evening light had faded out of the world before they
were agreed. Darkness wrapped them in its folds; they were but as voices
warring in a black and boundless void.

Whitaker struck a match and applied it to the solitary gas-jet. A thin,
blue, sputtering tongue of flame revealed them to one another. The girl
still crouched in her arm-chair, weary and spent, her powers of
contention all vitiated by the losing struggle. Whitaker was trembling
with nervous fatigue.

"Well?" he demanded.

"Oh, have your own way," she said drearily. "If it must be...."

"It's for the best," he insisted obstinately. "You'll never regret it."

"One of us will--either you or I," she said quietly. "It's too
one-sided. You want to give all and ask nothing in return. It's a fool's
bargain."

He hesitated, stammering with surprise. She had a habit of saying the
unexpected. "A fool's bargain"--the wisdom of the sage from the lips of
a child....

"Then it's settled," he said, business-like, offering his hand. "Fool's
bargain or not--it's a bargain."

She rose unassisted, then trusted her slender fingers to his palm. She
said nothing. The steady gaze of her extraordinary eyes abashed him.

"Come along and let's get it over," he muttered clumsily. "It's late,
and there's a train to New York at half-past ten, you might as well
catch."

She withdrew her hand, but continued to regard him steadfastly with her
enigmatic, strange stare. "So," she said coolly, "that's settled too, I
presume."

"I'm afraid you couldn't catch an earlier one," he evaded. "Have you any
baggage?"

"Only my suit-case. It won't take a minute to pack that."

"No hurry," he mumbled....

They left the hotel together. Whitaker got his change of a hundred
dollars at the desk--"Mrs. Morten's" bill, of course, included with
his--and bribed the bell-boy to take the suit-case to the railway
station and leave it there, together with his own hand-bag. Since