from its
passion, and its passion from its fear.

And she, seeing that she stood between him and the door, turned aside
and made his way clear for him.

And so he left her.

CHAPTER XXI

She stared at her own face in the glass without seeing it. Her brain was
filled with the loud, hurried ticking of the clock. It sounded somehow
as if it were out of gear. She felt herself swaying slightly as she
stood.

She was not going to faint bodily. It seemed to her rather that the
immaterial bonds, the unseen, subtle, intimate connections were letting
go their hold. Her soul was the heart of the danger. It was there that
the travelling powers of dissolution, accelerated, multiplying, had
begun their work and would end it. Its moments were not measured by the
ticking of the clock.

She had remained standing as Lucy had left her, with her back to the
door he had gone out by. She was thus unaware that a servant of the
hotel had come in, that he had delivered some message and was waiting
for her answer.

She started as the man spoke to her again. With a great effort her brain
grasped and repeated what he had said.

"Mr. Marston."

No; she was certainly not going to faint. There was no receding of
sensation. It was resurgence and invasion, violence shaking the very
doors of life. She heard the light, tremulous tread of the little pulses
of her body, scattered by the ringing hammer strokes of her heart and
brain. She heard the clock ticking out of gear, like the small,
irritable pulse of time.

She steadied her voice to answer.

"Very well. Show him in."

Marston's face, as he approached her, was harder and stiffer than ever;
his bearing more uncompromisingly upright and correct. He greeted her
with that peculiar deference that he showed to women whose acquaintance
he had yet to make. Decency required that he should start on a fresh
and completely purified footing with the future Mrs. Robert Lucy.

"It's charming of you," he said, "to let me come in."

"I wanted to see you, Wilfrid."

Something in her tone made him glance at her with a look that restored
her, for a moment, to her former place.

"That is still more charming," he replied.

"I've done what you told me. I've given him up."

A heavy flush spread over his face and relaxed the hard tension of the
muscles.

"I thought you'd do it."

"Well, I have done it." She paused.

"That's all I had to say to you."

Her voice struck at him like a blo