I suppose John's right. Everybody's
right. . . . But"--there was a valiant ring in her voice, "we'll show
'em they were wrong and cruel. Won't we?"

"Yes, Lucy."

"Good-by, then, and God bless and keep you."

"It's only for a year, Lucy."

I heard a short, dry sob. It was mine.

XXXII

I don't know how I got through the next ten days. After three of them
had passed I began to fear a mental breakdown, because my mind kept
working all by itself, without orders. If I wanted to think forward,
to the end of the probationary year, I couldn't. Always I kept
thinking I ought to have done, or said, so and so. I ought to have
been firmer. I was always reviving that drive in the taxicab with
Fulton, or that last interview with my father. If my love was strong
and fine I ought never to have knuckled under. They had had too easy a
time with me. I had played into their hands, and they had treated me
like a child. From pure humiliation I could not sleep at night.

And what was Lucy doing? How was she bearing it? What sort of life
was she leading, the poor, abused child? The world seemed to have all
joined against me in a conspiracy of silence. Nobody mentioned Lucy in
my hearing. Although the same city held us, until they moved to
Stamford, I had no accidental glimpse of her. Our last talk had not
been in the least satisfactory. It seemed to me that I must see her
once more to preach courage and hope. During those first ten nights I
hardly slept at all. Sometimes I would picture out Lucy's whole course
of life during the next few months. And I imagined that, grown at last
utterly indifferent through suffering, she might drift back into her
former relations with Fulton, if only because he loved her so much, and
no one can keep on saying no forever. Such imaginings had sometimes
the vividness of scenes actually witnessed and threw me into tortures
of jealousy.

Not until a short period of the tenth day was Lucy ever actually out of
my mind. I had been sitting in a chair staring at a newspaper, all my
nerves tense and hungry, when suddenly they seemed to have relaxed and
to have been fed. The skin of my face no longer seemed tightly
stretched. I felt as if I had waked from a refreshing sleep; but this
was not the case. I had simply, without deliberation, forgotten Lucy
for half an hour, and been making agreeable personal plans for the year
of probation.

"Good Lord," I thought; "has living wi