don't know what possesses me. I don't
know what I'm going to do, or how I'm going to do it. But it's all
over between us." She said this rapidly, fluently, in a decisive way,
quite foreign to her character as she had thought it.

"You are coming to bed, where you belong," said he quietly.

"No," replied she, pressing herself against her chair as if force were
being used to drag her from it. She cast about for something that
would make yielding impossible. "You are--repulsive to me."

He looked at her without change of countenance. Said he: "Come to bed.
I ask you for the last time."

There was no anger in his voice, no menace either open or covert;
simply finality--the last word of the man who had made himself feared
and secure in the mining-camps where the equation of personal courage
is straightway applied to every situation. Mildred shivered. She
longed to yield, to stammer out some excuse and obey him. But she
could not; nor was she able to rise from her chair. She saw in his
hard eyes a look of astonishment, of curiosity as to this unaccountable
defiance in one who had seemed docile, who had apparently no
alternative but obedience. He was not so astonished at her as she was
at herself. "What is to become of me?" her terror-stricken soul was
crying. "I must do as he says--I must--yet I cannot!" And she looked at
him and sat motionless.

He turned away, moved slowly toward the door, halted at the threshold
to give her time, was gone. A fit of trembling seized her; she leaned
forward and rested her arms upon the dressing-table or she would have
fallen from the chair to the floor. Yet, even as her fear made her
sick and weak, she knew that she would not yield.

The cold drove her to the couch, to lie under half a dozen of the
dressing-gowns and presently to fall into a sleep of exhaustion. When
she awoke after what she thought was a few minutes of unconsciousness,
the clamor of traffic in the Rue de Rivoli startled her. She started
up, glanced at the clock on the chimneypiece. It was ten minutes past
nine! When, by all the rules governing the action of the nerves, she
ought to have passed a wakeful night she had overslept more than an
hour. Indeed, she had had the first sound and prolonged sleep that had
come to her since the honeymoon began; for until then she had slept
alone all her life and the new order had almost given her chronic
insomnia. She rang for her maid and began to dress. The mai