I held myself with all my strength. "No, I don't understand," I whispered.

She caught her breath with half a sob, forlornly and as a child might.

"You must not understand. You are never to see me again."

"You know I can't do that," I said.

"You must do it," she answered very gravely.[Pg 88] "Be kind to me—" she paused, "because it's hard for me to send you away."

[Pg 88]

"You must tell me one thing more than that," said I; "is there—is there any one else?"

Her eyes fell. "That is it," she said at last, "there is somebody else."

"That is all, then," I said quietly. "I shall stay away until you send for me;" and I left her.

I have no remembrance of the walk back to the inn; but I closed my door behind me softly, as if I were shutting a door upon my dreams. Now I knew that the dull round of daily life, of little happenings and usual days, stretched before me, weary and indefinite. It made little difference to think that I might some day be sent for. Evidently it was to be Europe this summer after all. My only desire was to make my going a thing immediate and complete; to rupture so absolutely the threads of the woof that we had woven that I could feel myself separated from all, enough aloof from love to think of life. I did not stop to ask myself questions or to wonder precisely what was the nature of the impossibility that was driving me away. There would be time enough for that.

I began to pack feverishly, gathering my belongings[Pg 89] from their disposition about the room. I felt tired, as a man feels tired who has lost a battle; so that after I had packed a little I sank wearily into the chair before my bureau. Then after what may have been a minute or an hour of dull unconscious thought, I fell again to my task; pulling open the drawers from where I sat, and searching their depths for little odds and ends which I piled upon the bureau top. The bottom of the second drawer was covered with an old newspaper; and I smiled as I noticed that its fabric was already turning brittle and yellowish, and read the obsolete violence of the head-lines. Then a name half-way down the page caught me with a shock, and I slowly read and re-read the lines of tiny print, forming the empty phrases in my mind 

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