ad undertaken so
rashly.

She could not--_could_ not--go to Paris with this man, who for all his
devotion was a stranger to her. She could leave Owen, though it seemed
like tearing her heart out of her breast to go. But she could not go
away with another man.

Gone all at once was the glamour of her sacrifice. Although she knew
that by carrying out her scheme to the bitter end she might set Owen
free, it seemed to her at this moment that such freedom, so basely won,
could never bring her husband the happiness she craved for him.

For the first time, too, the thought of self would not be banished. She
saw the whole foolish, irrational, Quixotic scheme in its true light;
and flesh and blood shrank from a surrender which had no faintest touch
of love--or even passion--to dignify sordidness.

No. She could leave her husband--and in a sudden blinding flash of
insight she knew she could not--now--go back to Greenriver; but she
could not proceed farther on this shameful way.

To go to the hotel in Paris with this other man, to travel with him in
the enforced intimacy of their dual solitude, to pass, for all she knew,
as his wife when in reality she was the wife of the one man for whom the
great mystic trinity of body, soul and spirit passionately craved--oh,
no. She could not go on--and with the certainty came the need for haste.

Suddenly the only thing which seemed to matter in all the world was that
she must be gone before Leonard Dowson returned. If once he came back
and heard her decision, there would be scenes, reproaches, persuasions,
a hundred emotions let loose; and Toni was guiltily conscious, through
all her new-born resolution, that she was treating this man who loved
her unfairly.

He had been gone five minutes--he might return at any second. Tip-toeing
across to the window, Toni parted the red curtains and lifted a lath of
the old-fashioned Venetian blind to peer through into the fog.

She could not see much. Outside the hotel she could just distinguish the
blurred shape of the car, the lamps flaring yellowly in the mist; but
the shops and houses opposite were blotted out by the curtain of fog;
and she knew she risked running into the man from whom she longed,
desperately, to escape.

Where she would go did not matter now. Plans must be made
afterwards--now she had but one desire, to flee into the fog and be lost
to sight.

She was actually moving towards the door when a thought struck her.
Tearing a