. Surely it
would be more decent to come back to me than to go off with some other
man, heaven knows whom, which is what you must do--eventually?"

"It's what I won't do. I'm not going back to _that_. Don't you see
that's why I won't go back to you?"

Her apathy had become exhaustion. The flat, powerless voice, dying of
its own utterance, gave him a sense of things past and done with, sunk
into the ultimate oblivion. No voice of her energy and defiance could
have touched him so. Her indifference troubled him like passion; in its
completeness, its finality, it stirred him to decision, to acceptance of
its terms. She was ready to fall from his grasp by her own dead weight.
There was only one way in which he could hold her.

"Kitty," he said, "is that really why you won't come back?"

"Yes; that's why. Anything--anything but that."

"I see. You're tired of it? And you want to give it up? Well, I'm not
sure that I don't want you to."

"Then why," she moaned, "why won't you let me go?"

"Simply because I can't. I've tried it, Kitty. I can't."

He came and sat close to her. He leaned his face to hers and spoke
thickly and low.

"You can't give it up, dear. You're bound to go back."

"No--no--no. Don't talk about it."

"I won't. I won't ask you to go back; but I can't do without you."

"Oh yes, you can. There are other women."

"I loathe them all. I wouldn't do for one of them what I'll do for you."

"What will you do for me?"

"I'll marry you, Kitty."

She laughed in her tired fashion. "You want to make an honest woman of
me, do you?"

"No. I think I'm endeavouring to make myself an honest man. If you give
Lucy up for me I don't want you to lose by the transaction. You were to
have been married; but for me perhaps, you would have been. Very well,
I'll marry you."

"And that," said she, "will make it all right?"

"Well, won't it?"

"No, it won't. How could it?"

"You know how. It will help you to keep straight. That's what you want,
isn't it?"

"Oh yes, that's what I _want_. And you think I'll keep straight by
marrying you?"

"I won't swear to it. But I know it's ten to one that you'll go to the
devil if you don't marry me. And you say you don't want to do that."

"I don't want--to marry you."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Perhaps not; but even marrying me might be
better than the other alternative."

"It wouldn't," she cried. "It would be worse. If I married you I
couldn't get away from you.