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He sat down in a chair and his brow fell upon his hands. He felt as if he had been clutched and dragged backward by a powerful arm.

When at last he rose, he strode to the picture lying upon the floor, ground it under his heel, and spurned it from him with an imprecation.

He was, at a certain hour, to reach a particular bend in the road some miles distant. He was to walk to this place and if he found no one there, to wait.

When at sunset that evening he reached it, he was half an hour before the time specified, but he was not the first at the tryst. He was within twenty yards of the spot when a figure rose from the roots of a tree and stood waiting for him–the girl Dusk with a little bundle in her hand.

She was not flushed or tremulous with any hint of mental excitement; she awaited him with a fine repose, even the glow of the dying sun having no power to add to her color, but as he drew near he saw her look gradually change. She did not so much as stir, but the change grew slowly, slowly upon her face, and developed there into definite shape–the shape of secret, repressed dread.

“What is it,” she asked when he at last confronted her, “that ails ye?”

She uttered the words in a half whisper, as if she had not the power to speak louder, and he saw the hand hanging at her side close itself.

“What is it–that ails ye?”

He waited a few seconds before he answered her.

“Look at me,” he said at last, “and see.”

She did look at him. For the space of ten seconds their eyes were fixed upon each other in a long, bitter look. Then her little bundle dropped on the ground.

“Ye’ve went back on me,” she said under her breath again. “Ye’ve went back on me!”

He had thought she might make some passionate outcry, but she did not yet. A white wrath was in her face and her chest heaved, but she spoke slowly and low, her hands fallen down by her side.

“Ye’ve went back on me,” she said. “An’ I knew ye would.”

He felt that the odor of his utter falseness tainted the pure air about him; he had been false all round,–to himself, to his love, to his ideals,–even in a baser way here.

“Yes,” he answered her with a bitterness she did not understand, “I’ve gone back on you.” Then, as if to himself, “I could not even reach perfection in villainy.”

Then her rage and misery broke forth.

“Yer a coward!” she said, with gasps between her words. “Yer afraid! I’d sooner–I’d sooner ye’d killed me–dead!”

Her voice shrilled itself into a smothered shriek, she cast herself face downward upon the earth and lay there clutching amid her sobs at the grass.

He looked down at her in a cold, stunned fashion.

“Do you think,” he said hoarsely, “that you can loathe me as I loathe myself? Do you think you can call me one shameful name I don’t know I deserve? If you can, for God’s sake let me have it.”

She struck her fist against the earth.

“Thar wasn’t a man I ever saw,” she said, “that didn’t foller after me, ‘n’ do fur me, ‘n’ wait fur a word from me. They’d hev let me set my foot on ’em if I’d said it. Thar wasn’t nothin’ I mightn’t hev done–not nothin’. An’ now–an’ now “–and, she tore the grass from its earth and flung it from her.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on and say your worst.”

Her worst was bad enough, but he almost exulted under the blows she dealt him. He felt the horrible sting a vague comfort. He had fallen low enough surely when it was a comfort to be told that he was a liar, a poltroon, and a scoundrel.

The sun had been down an hour when it was over and she had risen and taken up her bundle.