tone spurred her to instant decision.

"My wish is to go back to Zermatt at once, by the funicular; and . . .
that we should not see one another again. I will accept nothing from
you. I can earn my own living, as I have done till now. Thank God,
Michael is too blessedly Bohemian to make a fuss, or be horrified at
things. He will simply be overjoyed to get me back."

She turned from him hastily; and he stood, like a man paralysed,
watching her go. On the threshold of the bedroom door she looked back.

"Don't think of writing to me, or of trying to patch up a
reconciliation between us," she said on a softened note. "Mended
things are never reliable. I can neither forget nor forgive what you
have said to me to-day, and when you have had time to think things
over, you will probably feel thankful that I had the courage to leave
you."

The soft closing of the door roused him, and he sprang forward with her
name on his lips. Then Pride gripped him; Pride, and the habit of
self-mastery hammered into him by his redoubtable uncle. The fact that
our spirits thus live and work, deathlessly, in the lives and hearts of
those with whom we have come into contact, is a form of immortality too
seldom recognised by man.

In the silence that followed, Lenox looked blankly round the empty
room:--the room where they should have spent their first evening
together. Then the irony, the finality of it all, overwhelmed him, and
he sank upon the nearest chair. "What have I done? . . . My God, what
have I done?" he breathed aloud. And it is characteristic of the man
that, for all his grinding sense of injury, he blamed himself more
bitterly than he blamed his wife.

His eye fell on the letter, which, had it contained a bombshell, could
scarce have wrought more damage in so short a space of time. Tearing
it across and across, he flung it into the fire, and derived a gloomy
satisfaction from watching it burn. But though paper and ink were
reduced to ashes, neither fire nor steel could annihilate the winged
words, thoughtlessly penned, that had altered the course of two lives.

Footsteps in the bedroom brought Lenox again to his feet.

He flung the door open, expecting--he knew what.

An apathetic hotel porter was removing Quita's trunk: and nothing that
had been said or done in the last half-hour had hurt him so keenly as
this insignificant item:--the touch of commonplace that levels all
things.

With a gesture he indicated