ne at last. The half-hour was
not quite spent.

"I'm going to get dinner ready," said Mary, rising from her table.

"Then I'll go," said Katharine.

"Why don't you stay? Where are you going?"

Katharine looked round the room, conveying her uncertainty in her
glance.

"Perhaps I might find him," she mused.

"But why should it matter? You'll see him another day."

Mary spoke, and intended to speak, cruelly enough.

"I was wrong to come here," Katharine replied.

Their eyes met with antagonism, and neither flinched.

"You had a perfect right to come here," Mary answered.

A loud knocking at the door interrupted them. Mary went to open it, and
returning with some note or parcel, Katharine looked away so that Mary
might not read her disappointment.

"Of course you had a right to come," Mary repeated, laying the note upon
the table.

"No," said Katharine. "Except that when one's desperate one has a sort
of right. I am desperate. How do I know what's happening to him now? He
may do anything. He may wander about the streets all night. Anything may
happen to him."

She spoke with a self-abandonment that Mary had never seen in her.

"You know you exaggerate; you're talking nonsense," she said roughly.

"Mary, I must talk--I must tell you--"

"You needn't tell me anything," Mary interrupted her. "Can't I see for
myself?"

"No, no," Katharine exclaimed. "It's not that--"

Her look, passing beyond Mary, beyond the verge of the room and out
beyond any words that came her way, wildly and passionately, convinced
Mary that she, at any rate, could not follow such a glance to its end.
She was baffled; she tried to think herself back again into the height
of her love for Ralph. Pressing her fingers upon her eyelids, she
murmured:

"You forget that I loved him too. I thought I knew him. I DID know him."

And yet, what had she known? She could not remember it any more. She
pressed her eyeballs until they struck stars and suns into her darkness.
She convinced herself that she was stirring among ashes. She desisted.
She was astonished at her discovery. She did not love Ralph any more.
She looked back dazed into the room, and her eyes rested upon the table
with its lamp-lit papers. The steady radiance seemed for a second to
have its counterpart within her; she shut her eyes; she opened them and
looked at the lamp again; another love burnt in the place of the old
one, or so, in a momentary glance of amazement, she gues