adrid, which would end it all.

And a pang of hideous pain shot through him, and he did not speak.

In the distance the lights blazed into the night, and the sight of them
froze Theodora to ice.

It was finished then--their hour of joy.

"My darling," he exclaimed, passionately, "good-bye, and remember all my
life is in your hands, and I will spend it in worship of you and
thankfulness for this hour of yourself you have given to me. I am yours
to do with as you will until death do us part."

"And I," said Theodora, "will never love another man--and if we have
sinned we have sinned together--and now, oh, Hector, we must face our
fates."

Her voice tore his very heartstrings in its unutterable pathos.

And in that last passionate kiss it seemed as if they exchanged their
very souls.

Then they drove into the glare of the restaurant lights, having tasted
of the knowledge of good and evil.

XIII

"What have I done? What have I done?" Hector groaned to himself in
anguish as he paced up and down his room at the Ritz an hour after the
party had broken up, and he had driven Mrs. McBride back in his
automobile, leaving hers to father and daughter.

All through supper Theodora had sat limp and white as death, and every
time she had looked at him her eyes had reminded him of a fawn he had
wounded once at Bracondale, in the park, with his bow and arrow, when he
was a little boy. He remembered how fearfully proud he had been as he
saw it fall, and then how it had lain in his arms and bled and bled, and
its tender eyes had gazed at him in no reproach, only sorrow and pain,
and a dumb asking why he had hurt it.

All the light of the stars seemed quenched, no eyes in the world had
ever looked so unutterably pathetic as Theodora's eyes, and gradually as
they sat and talked platitudes and chaffed with the elderly fiancees, it
had come to him how cruel he had been--he who had deliberately used
every art to make her love him--and now, having gained his end, what
could he do for her? What for himself? Nothing but sorrow faced them
both. He had taken brutal advantage of her gentleness and
innocence--when chivalry alone should have made him refrain.

He saw himself as he was--the hunter and she the hunted--and the
knowledge that he would pay with all the anguish and regret of a
passionate, hopeless love--perhaps for the rest of his life--did not
balance things to his awakened soul. If his years should be one long,
gna