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He took a step forward, his hand before him, his face twitching uncontrollably. The collie on the step awoke, and seeing his mistress threatened, growled ominously.

“Stop, I tell you!” Arnold choked for words. This the man of “why,” whom nothing before could shake!

Camilla paled as her companion arose, and the dog, bristling, came inside the room.

“Get out!” blazed the man, with a threatening step, and the collie fled.

The interruption loosed words which came tumbling forth in a torrent, as Arnold returned to face her.

“You think I’m human, and yet tell me that to my face?” His voice was terrible. “You women brand men cruel! No man on earth would speak as you have spoken to a woman he’d lived with for four years!” The sentences crowded over each other, like water over a fall–his eyes flashing like a spray.

“I told you before, I’m not on trial; that it was not my place to defend. I don’t do so now; but since you’ve spoken, I’ll answer your question. You ask why I didn’t come a year ago, hinting that I wanted to be more cruel. God! the blindness and injustice of you women! Because we men don’t show–Bah!… I was paying my own price. We weren’t living by the marriage vow; it was but a farce. Our own contract was the vital thing, and it had said–But I won’t repeat. God, it was bitter! But I thought you’d come back. I loved you still.” He paused for words, breathing hard.

“You say, I’ll never know what love is. Blind! I’ve always loved you until this moment, when you killed my love. You say I was untrue. It’s false. I swear it before–you, as you were once,–when you were my god. Had you trusted me, as I trusted you, there’d have been no thought of unfaithfulness in your mind.”

The woman sank back in the chair, her face covered, her whole body trembling; but Asa Arnold went on like the storm.

“Yes, I was ever true to you. From the first moment we met, and against my own beliefs. You didn’t see. You expected me to protest it daily: to repeat the tale as a child repeats its lesson for a comfit. Blind, I say, blind! You’ll charge that I never told you that I loved you. You wouldn’t have believed me, even had I done so. Besides, I didn’t realize that you doubted, until the time when you were learning–” he walked jerkily across the room and took up his hat,–“learning the thing you threw in my face.” He started to leave, but stopped in the doorway, without looking back. “You tell me you’ve suffered. For the first time in my life I say to another human being: I hope so.” He turned, unsteadily, down the steps.

“Wait,” pleaded the woman. “Wait!”

The man did not stop, or turn.

Camilla Maurice sank back in the chair, weak as one sick unto death, her mind a throbbing, whirling chaos,–as of a patient under an anaesthetic. Something she knew she ought to do, intended doing, and could not. She groped desperately, but overwhelming, insistent, there had developed in her a sudden, preventing tumult–in paradox, a confusion in rhythm–like the beating of a great hammer on an anvil, only incredibly more swift than blows from human hands. Over and over again she repeated to herself the one word: “wait,” “wait,” “wait,” but mechanically now, without thought as to the reason. Then, all at once, soft, all-enfolding, kindly Nature wrapped her in darkness.

She awoke with the big collie licking her hand, and a numbness of cramped limbs that was positive pain. A long-necked pullet was standing in the doorway, with her mouth open; others stood wondering, beyond. The sun had moved until it no longer shone in at the tiny south windows, and the shadow of the house had begun to lengthen.

Camilla stood up in the doorway; uncertain, dazed. A great lump was on her forehead, which she stroked absently, without surprise at its presence. She looked about the yard, and, her breath coming more quickly, at the prairie. A broad green plain, parted by the road squarely in the centre, smiled at her in the sunlight. That was all. She stepped outside and shaded her eyes with her hand. Not a wagon nor a human being was in sight.