rew her hair back plain. Paul liked the curls falling about her
throat. She must never try to please him again. Never! She must bid him
good-bye now. It meant forever. Maybe when she was dead--He was coming:
she heard his foot on the stairs, his hand on the latch. God help her to
be a true woman!

"Grey!"

He touched the hand covering her eyes.

"It is so cold! You mean to leave me, Grey?"

She drew back, sitting down on a camp-chest, and looked up at him. He had
not come there to tempt her by passionate evil: she saw that. This pain he
had fought with in his soul all night, trying to see what God meant by it,
had left his face subdued, earnest, sorrowful. Perhaps since Paul Blecker
left his mother's knee he had never been so like a child as now.

"Yes, I must go. He will not claim me. I am glad I was spared that. I'm
going to try and do right with the rest of my life, Paul."

Blecker said nothing, paced the floor of the room, his head sunk on his
breast.

"Let us go out of this," at last. "I'm choked. I think in the free air we
will know what is right, better."

She put on her hood, and they went out, the girl drawing back on the
steps, lest he should offer to assist her.

"I will not touch you, Grey," he said, gravely, "unless you give me
leave."

Somehow, as she followed him down the deserted street, she felt how puny
her trouble was, after all, to his. She had time to notice the drops of
sweat wrung out on his forehead, and wish she dared to wipe them away; but
he strode on in silence, forgetting even her, facing this inscrutable fate
that mastered them, with a strong man's desperation. They came to the
river, out of sight of the town. She stopped.

"We must wait here. I must stay where I can hear the train coming."

"The train,--yes. You are going in it? Yet, Grey, you love me?"

She wrung her hands with a frightened cry.

"Paul, don't tempt me. I'm weak: you know that. Don't make me fouler than
I am. There 's something in the world better for us than love: to try to
be pure and true. You'll help me to be that, dear Paul?"--laying her hand
on his arm, beseechingly. "You'll not keep me back? It's hard, you
know,"--trying to smile, her lips only growing colorless.

"I'll help you, Grey,"--his face distorted, touching her fingers for an
instant with an unutterable tenderness. "I knew this man was here from the
first. If there was crime in our marriage, I took it on myself. I was not
afraid to face he