He looked at her as never yet. "What was it he did to you?"

"Everything!" Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell.
"Good-bye."

He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man's
death. "You mean that we meet no more?"

"Not as we've met--not THERE!"

He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the
renouncement that rang out in the word she so expressively sounded.
"But what's changed--for you?"

She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the first
time since he had known her made her splendidly stern. "How can
you understand now when you didn't understand before?"

"I didn't understand before only because I didn't know. Now that I
know, I see what I've been living with for years," Stransom went on
very gently.

She looked at him with a larger allowance, doing this gentleness
justice. "How can I then, on this new knowledge of my own, ask you
to continue to live with it?"

"I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings," Stransom began;
but she quietly interrupted him.