alous of you."

"Jealous of me?" The blood flew up under his brown skin.

"Blind with it--what else would drive him to this folly? And I can't
have her think me jealous too! I've said all I could, short of making
her think so; and she's refused a word more to either of us. Our only
chance now is that she should listen to you--that you should make her
see the harm her silence may do."

Darrow uttered a protesting exclamation. "It's all too
preposterous--what you suggest! I can't, at any rate, appeal to her on
such a ground as that!"

Anna laid her hand on his arm. "Appeal to her on the ground that I'm
almost Owen's mother, and that any estrangement between you and him
would kill me. She knows what he is--she'll understand. Tell her to say
anything, do anything, she wishes; but not to go away without speaking,
not to leave THAT between us when she goes!"

She drew back a step and lifted her face to his, trying to look into his
eyes more deeply than she had ever looked; but before she could discern
what they expressed he had taken hold of her hands and bent his head to
kiss them.

"You'll see her? You'll see her?" she entreated; and he answered: "I'll
do anything in the world you want me to."

XXVI

Darrow waited alone in the sitting-room.

No place could have been more distasteful as the scene of the talk that
lay before him; but he had acceded to Anna's suggestion that it would
seem more natural for her to summon Sophy Viner than for him to go in
search of her. As his troubled pacings carried him back and forth a
relentless hand seemed to be tearing away all the tender fibres of
association that bound him to the peaceful room. Here, in this very
place, he had drunk his deepest draughts of happiness, had had his lips
at the fountain-head of its overflowing rivers; but now that source was
poisoned and he would taste no more of an untainted cup.

For a moment he felt an actual physical anguish; then his nerves
hardened for the coming struggle. He had no notion of what awaited him;
but after the first instinctive recoil he had seen in a flash the urgent
need of another word with Sophy Viner. He had been insincere in letting
Anna think that he had consented to speak because she asked it. In
reality he had been feverishly casting about for the pretext she had
given him; and for some reason this trivial hypocrisy weighed on him
more than all his heavy burden of deceit.

At length he heard a step behind him