ther thought, no other dream, than to stay by your side, to see you
happy, to give all there was of myself into your keeping, to keep it
holy and sacred for you--John, what then?"

Never a line in his face softened. He looked at her a moment as he had
looked at the woman in Piccadilly, into whose hand he had dropped gold.

"Are you going to tell me that it is the truth?" he asked hoarsely.

She stood quite still, her bosom rising and falling. Even then she made
one last effort. She held out her hands with a little trembling gesture,
her eyes filled with tears.

"Think for a single moment of that feeling which you call love, John!"
she pleaded. "Listen! I love you. It has come to me at last, after all
these years. It lives in my heart, a greater thing than my ambition, a
greater thing than my success, a greater thing than life itself. I love
you, John. Can't you feel, don't you know, that nothing else in life can
matter?"

Not a line in his face softened. His teeth had come together. He was
like a man upon the rack.

"It is true? It is true, then?" he demanded.

She looked at him without any reply. The seconds seemed drawn out to an
interminable period. He heard the rolling of the motor-buses in the
street. Once more the perfume of the lilacs seemed to choke him. Then
she leaned back and touched the bell.

"The prince spoke the truth," she said. "I think you had better go!"

XXXVII

Before the wide-flung window of her attic bedchamber, Sophy Gerard was
crouching with her face turned westward. She had abandoned all effort to
sleep. The one thought that was beating in her brain was too insistent,
too clamorous. Somewhere beyond that tangled mass of chimneys and
telegraph-poles, somewhere on the other side of the gray haze which hung
about the myriad roofs, John and Louise were working out their destiny,
speaking at last the naked truth to each other.

Somehow or other, during those few minutes every thought of herself and
her own life seemed to have passed away. John's face seemed always
before her--the sudden, hard lines about his mouth; the dull, smoldering
pain in his eyes. How would he return? Louise had guarded the secret of
her life so well. Would he wrest it from her, or--

She started suddenly back into the room. There was a knocking at the
door, something quite different from her landlady's summons. She wrapped
her dressing-gown around her, pulled the curtains