n eyes had dried and
become rather terribly alert. Something too fine--too exquisitely
balanced in him had been disturbed and broken beyond hope.

"It proves what I have suspected for a long time, Robert. You know it's
not a light thing to make an enemy like that. He's taken his time, but
you see in the end he has taken everything I had. First he made me a
liar and a hypocrite. Then he took you. He sent that girl specially to
come between us. And now Miss Christine. I suppose he thinks that's
done for me. But it's a great mistake to make people desperate, Robert.
You should always leave them some little thing that they care for and
which makes them cowards. Now, you see, I simply don't care any more. I
don't care for myself or even my poor sister. I'm going to fight him in
the open, gloves off. I'll wrestle with him and prevail. I'll give blow
for blow. I'm going now to Hyde Park to tell people the truth about him.
They take him altogether too lightly, Robert. They're inclined to laugh
at him as of no account. That's a great mistake, too. I shall warn
them." He nodded mysteriously. "God is a devil--a cruel, dangerous
devil."

Then he bent and kissed Christine's hand, very solemnly and tenderly, as
some battered, comical Don Quixote might have done before setting out on
a last fantastic quest. And presently Robert heard him patter down the
narrow stairs and over the cobbles to the open street.

They were alone now. He bent over her and said: "Christine--Christine,"
reassuringly, so that she should not be afraid, and gathered her in his
arms. How little she was--no heavier than a child--and cold. Her grey
head rested against his shoulder. If she had only stirred and laughed,
and said: "Your father was strong too!" he would have answered gently.
He would have been glad that the memory of his father could make her
happy. But it was all too late.

He carried her into her room. It was like her to have left it so neat
and ordered--each thing in its place--her out-door shoes standing
decorously together under the window, and her best skirt peeping out from
behind the cretonne curtain. Her hair-brush, with the comb planted in
its bristles, lay exactly in the middle of the pine-wood dressing-table.
When she had put it there, she had not known that it was for the last
time.

Or had she known? She had called out to him so insistently. She had
wanted to say good-bye. And he had gone on, not answe