did you do it for? What am I to
think?"

That he had had proof of her disloyalty relieved her. There would be
less to say in this settling of accounts.

"Well," she answered, looking into his eyes. "You saw!"

He cried desperately, "I saw him kiss you. You let him. What did it
mean?"

"Why do you ask? If you saw you know."

"I don't know. I want to know. Tell me, explain to me." He paused,
and then cried with a pitiful note of pleading, "Tell me it wasn't so.
Tell me I made a mistake."

He was willing, anxious, for her to lie. Against the evidence of his
own senses he would have made himself believe her, drugged his pain
with her falsehoods. What remnant of consideration she had vanished.

"You made no mistake," she answered. "It was as you saw."

"I don't believe it. I can't. You wouldn't have done it. It's I
you're promised to. Haven't I your word? Haven't you been kind as an
angel to me when the others would have let me die out here like a dog?
What did you do it for if you didn't care?"

"I was sorry," and then with cold, measured slowness, "and I felt
guilty."

"That's it--you felt guilty. It's not your doing. You've been led
away. While I've been sick that devil's been poisoning you against me.
He's tried to steal you from me. But you're not the girl to let him do
that. You'll come back to me--the man that you belong to, that's loved
you since the day we started."

To her at this naked hour, where nothing lived but the truth, the
thought that he would take her back with the other man's kisses on her
lips, made her unsparing. She drew back from him, stiffening in
shocked repugnance, and speaking with the same chill deliberation.

"I'll never come back to you. It's all over, that love with you. I
didn't know. I didn't feel. I was a child with no sense of what she
was doing. Now everything's different. It's he I must go with and be
with as long as I live."

The hideousness of the discovery had been made the night before. Had
her words been his first intimation they might have shocked him into
stupefied dumbness and made him seem the hero who meets his fate with
closed lips. But hours long he had brooded and knew her severance from
him had taken place. With the mad insistance of a thought whirling on
in fevered repetition he had told himself that he must win her back,
urge, struggle, plead, till he had got her where she was before or lose
her forever.

"You can't. Y