She turned away and at a distance of a few feet stopped. She gave him a
last look--a fierce one in its contempt and anger, and her affluence of
beauty had never been so stubborn a fact before.

"Ye think ye've left me behind," she said. "An' so ye hev--but it aint
fur allers. The time'll come when mebbe ye'll see me ag'in."

He returned to New York, but he had been there a week before he went to
Rebecca. Finally, however, he awoke one morning feeling that the time
had come for the last scene of his miserable drama. He presented himself
at the house and sent up his name, and in three minutes Rebecca came to
him.

It struck him with a new thrill of wretchedness to see that she wore
by chance the very dress she had worn the day he had made the sketch--a
pale, pure-looking gray, with a scarf of white lace loosely fastened at
her throat. Next, he saw that there was a painful change in her, that
she looked frail and worn, as if she had been ill. His first words he
scarcely heard and never remembered. He had not come to make a defense,
but a naked, bitter confession. As he made it low and monotonously, in
brief, harsh words, holding no sparing for himself, Rebecca stood with
her hand upon the mantle looking at him with simple directness. There
was no rebuke in her look, but there was weariness. It occurred to him
once or twice and with a terribly humiliating pang, that she was tired
of him,--tired of it all.

"I have lost you," he ended. "And I have lost myself. I have seen myself
as I am,--a poorer figure, a grosser one than I ever dreamed of being,
even in the eyes of my worst enemy. Henceforth, this figure will be
my companion. It is as if I looked at myself in a bad glass; but now,
though the reflection is a pitiable one, the glass is true."

"You think," she said, after a short silence, "of going away?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"To Europe."

"Oh," she ejaculated, with a soft, desperate sound of pain.

His eyes had been downcast and he raised them.

"Yes," he said, mournfully. "We were to have gone together."

"Yes," she answered, "together."

Her eyes were wet.

"I was very happy," she said, "for a little while."

She held out her hand.

"But," she added, as if finishing a sentence, "you have been truer to me
than you think."

"No--no," he groaned.

"Yes, truer to me than you think--and truer to yourself. It was I you
loved--I! There have been times when I thought I must give that up,
but now I know