em ever more and more completely. She believed that
they would remain strangers for the rest of their lives. Very
curiously, those three words which she had read upon the tree
served to strengthen this conviction. They were, indeed, to her as
a message from the dead. The man who had written them had ceased
to exist. Guy might have written them in the old days, but his
likeness to Guy was no more. She saw them both now with a
distinctness that was almost cruel--the utter weakness of the one,
the merciless strength of the other. And in the bitterness of her
soul she marvelled that either of them had ever managed to reach
her heart.

That could never be so again, so she told herself. The power to
love had been wrested from her. The object of her love had turned
into a monstrous demon of jealousy from which now she shrank more
and more--though she might never escape. Yes, she had loved them
both, and still her compassion lingered pitifully around the
thought of Guy. But for Burke she had only a shrinking that almost
amounted to aversion. He had slain her love. She even believed
she was beginning to hate him.

She dreaded the prospect of another long day spent at Brennerstadt.
It was the day of the diamond draw, too. The place would be a
seething tumult. She was so unutterably tired. She thought with a
weary longing of Blue Hill Farm. At least she would find a measure
of peace there, though healing were denied her. This place had
become hateful to her, an inferno of vice and destruction. She
yearned to leave it.

Something of this yearning she betrayed on the following morning
when Burke told her that he was making arrangements to leave by the
evening train for Ritzen.

"Can't we go sooner?" she said.

He looked at her as if surprised by the question. "There is a
train at midday," he said. "But it is not a good time for
travelling."

"Oh, let us take it!" she said feverishly. "Please let us take it!
We might get back to the farm by to-night then."

He had sent his horse back to Ritzen the previous day in the care
of a man he knew, so that both their animals would be waiting for
them.

"Do you want to get back?" said Burke.

"Oh, yes--yes! Anything is better than this." She spoke rapidly,
almost passionately. "Let us go! Do let us go!"

"Very well," said Burke. "If you wish it."

He paused at the door of the office a few minutes later, when they
descended, to tell the girl there that