self away.

"You won't forget Wednesday?" she said to him, as she followed him into
the hall.

"No. Is there anything else that you wish--that I could do?"

"No, nothing. But if there is I will ask."

Then, looking up, she shrank from something in his face--something
accusing, passionate, profound.

He wrung her hand.

"Promise that you will ask."

She murmured something, and he turned away.

* * * * *

She came back alone into the drawing-room.

"Oh, what a good man!" she said, sighing. "What a good man!"

And then, all in a moment, she was thankful that he was gone--that she
was alone with and mistress of her pain.

The passion and misery which his visit had interrupted swept back upon
her in a rushing swirl, blinding and choking every sense. Ah, what a
scene, to which his coming had put an end--scene of bitterness, of
recrimination, not restrained even by this impending anguish
of parting!

It came as a close to a week during which she and Warkworth had been
playing the game which they had chosen to play, according to its
appointed rules--the delicacies and restraints of friendship masking,
and at the same time inflaming, a most unhappy, poisonous, and growing
love. And, finally, there had risen upon them a storm-wave of
feeling--tyrannous, tempestuous--bursting in reproach and agitation,
leaving behind it, bare and menacing, the old, ugly facts, unaltered and
unalterable.

Warkworth was little less miserable than herself. That she knew. He
loved her, as it were, to his own anger and surprise. And he suffered in
deserting her, more than he had ever suffered yet through any human
affection.

But his purpose through it all remained stubbornly fixed; that, also,
she knew. For nearly a year Aileen Moffatt's fortune and Aileen
Moffatt's family connections had entered into all his calculations of
the future. Only a few more years in the army, then retirement with
ample means, a charming wife, and a seat in Parliament. To jeopardize a
plan so manifestly desirable, so easy to carry out, so far-reaching in
its favorable effects upon his life, for the sake of those hard and
doubtful alternatives in which a marriage with Julie would involve him,
never seriously entered his mind. When he suffered he merely said to
himself, steadily, that time would heal the smart for both of them.

"Only one thing would be absolutely fatal for all of us--that I should
break with Aileen."

Ju