rick's eyes fixed her with their deep pity and their deeper
apprehension. "There are few things so bad as that," she said slowly,
"and those are the ones we must not touch."

Flora paused a moment on the brink of her last plunge. "Do you think
what I am going to do is such a thing as that?"

"Oh, my poor child, how do I know? I hope, I pray it is not!" Her
fingers closed on Flora's hand, and the girl clung to the kind grasp. It
was a comfort, though it could not save her from the real finality.

In spite of the consciousness of a friendly presence in the house her
fears increased as the afternoon waned, and her thoughts went back to
what she had left behind her, and forward to what might be coming--the
one person whom she so longed for, and so dreaded to see. He might be on
his way now. He might at this moment be hurrying down the hedged lane
from the station; and when he should come, and when they two were face
to face, there would be no other "next time" for them. Everything was
crystalizing, getting hard. Everything was getting too near the end to
be malleable any more. It was her last chance to make him relinquish his
unworthy purpose; perhaps his last chance to save himself from
captivity. She found she hadn't a thing left unsaid, an argument left
unused. What could she do that she had not done before, except to show
him by just being here, accessible and ready to serve him at any risk,
how much she cared? Could his generosity resist that?

Beyond the fact of getting him away safe she didn't think. Beyond that
nothing looked large to her, nothing looked definite. The returning of
the sapphire itself seemed simple beside it, and the fact that her
position in the matter might never be explained of no importance.

Now while every moment drew her nearer her greatest moment she grew more
absent, more strained, more restless, more intently listening, more
easily starting at the lightest sound; until, at last, when the late day
touched the rooms with fiery sunset colors, her friend, watchful of her
changing mood, ready at every point to palliate circumstance, drew her
out into the garden.

The wind, which had fallen with approaching evening, was only a whisper
among the trees. The greenish-white bodies of statues in the shrubbery
glowed ruddy. Gathering their skirts from the grass that glittered with
the drops of the last shower, arm in arm the two women walked down the
broad central gravel drive between ribbon beds