our honor
beyond my happiness. If I marry you, your career is destroyed by your
wife; and the day will come when you will tell me so. I can suffer--I
can die; but I can _not_ face such a prospect as that. Forgive me and
forget me. I can say no more!"

She let go of my hand, and sank on the floor. The utter despair of that
action told me, far more eloquently than the words which she had
just spoken, that her resolution was immovable. She had deliberately
separated herself from me; her own act had parted us forever.

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TWO DESTINIES.

I MADE no movement to leave the room; I let no sign of sorrow escape me.
At last, my heart was hardened against the woman who had so obstinately
rejected me. I stood looking down at her with a merciless anger, the
bare remembrance of which fills me at this day with a horror of myself.
There is but one excuse for me. The shock of that last overthrow of the
one hope that held me to life was more than my reason could endure. On
that dreadful night (whatever I may have been at other times), I myself
believe it, I was a maddened man.

I was the first to break the silence.

"Get up," I said coldly.

She lifted her face from the floor, and looked at me as if she doubted
whether she had heard aright.

"Put on your hat and cloak," I resumed. "I must ask you to go back with
me as far as the boat."

She rose slowly. Her eyes rested on my face with a dull, bewildered
look.

"Why am I to go with you to the boat?" she asked.

The child heard her. The child ran up to us with her little hat in one
hand, and the key of the cabin in the other.

"I'm ready," she said. "I will open the cabin door."

Her mother signed to her to go back to the bed-chamber. She went back
as far as the door which led into the courtyard, and waited there,
listening. I turned to Mrs. Van Brandt with immovable composure, and
answered the question which she had addressed to me.

"You are left," I said, "without the means of getting away from this
place. In two hours more the tide will be in my favor, and I shall sail
at once on the return voyage. We part, this time, never to meet again.
Before I go I am resolved to leave you properly provided for. My money
is in my traveling-bag in the cabin. For that reason, I am obliged to
ask you to go with me as far as the boat."

"I thank you gratefully for your kindness," she said. "I don't stand in
such serious need of help as you suppose."

"It is useless t