That handclasp finished what the spring sunshine of the morning had begun. She stood there, swaying a little, her lithe body still immature; the electric light from overhead falling directly upon her blue-black hair and level brows; her damp red lips parted; her face white, but warm and dusky, and her great dark eyes wide, half-terrified, seeing things they had never seen before.

Von Klausen's boyish face glowed. His blue gaze sparkled as if with electric fire. His wounded hand closed about her fingers.

The circuit was complete.

"I love you!" he whispered, and he took her in his arms.

From somewhere, somewhere that seemed far, far away, Muriel heard a voice that answered him and knew that it was her own voice:

"I love you!"

She clung to him; she held him fast. She knew. It was a knowledge beyond reason. There was no need to reason why these things should be so, when they were. She was aware only that in the kisses falling upon her lips, in the hands holding her tight, in the heart pounding against her breast there was a power that she missed in Stainton: a power that answered to the force in her own true being.

"But--but it can't be! It can't be!" she sobbed.

Von Klausen kissed her again: the long, long kiss of youth and love.

"But Jim----You don't know him. I can't hurt him. He is too good. He is far, far too good for either of us."

Von Klausen's reply was another kiss, but this time a light, an almost merry kiss.

"He need never know," said the Austrian.

She leaped from his arms. She sprang a yard away. Her face went rigid.

"You--you----" she said. "What do you mean? I tell you that I could never ask Jim to divorce me, and you say that he needn't know!"

It was the Austrian who was amazed now. He was frankly at sea.

"Divorce?" he echoed. "Who spoke of divorce?"

"Go!"

Muriel's face was crimson. She drew herself to her full height. She pointed to the door. Her finger shook with anger; her eyes shone with hate and shame.

"Go!"

"But what does this mean? I love you. You love me. Yet you tell me go."

"Love?" The word seemed to sicken her. "Love? You don't know what the word means. You don't know! You don't know!" She pa.s.sed her hand across her face. "Oh, leave here!" she cried. "Leave here at once!"

"But, Muriel----"

"Go!" She moved to the call-b.u.t.ton in the wall. "At once, or I'll ring for the servants."

"Muriel----"

"Don't speak! Don't dare to say another word to me! If you speak again, I'll ring."

He raised his arms once more and looked at her. What he observed gave him no explanation and no comfort. His arms fell to his slim sides. He shrugged his shoulders, picked up his hat and coat, and left the room.

Drawing back from his pa.s.sing figure as if his touch were contamination, Muriel waited until he had gone. She closed the door behind him; tried to bolt it; remembered that it secured itself by a spring lock which only a key could open from the hall; then, almost in a faint, fell into the wide arm-chair where she had sat when she sent von Klausen to the window.

Stainton opened the door fifteen minutes later. He was fatigued from his day and haggard from his solitary confetti-beaten walk along the boulevards. He saw her nearly rec.u.mbent before him, limp and pale.

"Muriel!" he cried.

She opened her heavy eyes.

"Jim!"

He hurried to her, knelt beside her. He stroked her hair as a father strokes the hair of his weary child.

"My poor little girl!" he said.

Had she thought at all coherently about his coming, she had not meant to suffer his caresses until she had told him something of what had occurred. But, before she found time to begin a narrative of the truth, or the half truth, he began to pet her. She could not confess to him while he did that.

"I thought you were lost," she said. "We looked, but couldn't find you anywhere. I thought you might have been run over. I thought--I hardly know what I thought."

"My dear little girl!" he murmured. He patted her left hand. He reached for its fellow. "Why," he cried, "you've hurt yourself!"

Muriel started.

"No, no!" she said. "It's nothing. Truly, it's nothing. It's----" She laughed shrilly. "I asked Captain von Klausen to open the window. It stuck--the window, I mean. He put his hand through the gla.s.s and cut his wrist. I bandaged it. I scratched myself when I picked up some of the pieces from the floor."

She realised that she had gone too far to retreat. She had lied again to her husband, and for no adequate reason. She had crossed the Rubicon of marital ethics.

After that she was committed to silence. Every endeavour she made to draw back involved her in a new ambush, brought her to a new maze of deception. Truth became impossible.

She wanted to tell the truth. The more impossible it became, the more bitterly she wanted to tell it. She hated von Klausen. She was sure that she had never loved her husband as she loved him now. The fact that her relations with the Austrian had begun and ended with a mere declaration of love did not, in her eyes, lessen the sin; the fact that von Klausen had misunderstood her att.i.tude and had himself a.s.sumed an att.i.tude far below that which she had at first expected, increased her antipathy against her lover and heightened her affection--call it love as she would, it would now be no more than affection--for Jim. She wanted to tell him, but every lapsing moment laid a new stone upon the wall that barred her way.

She sat down in a chair before him and put her face in her hands.

"Jim," she said in a low voice, "I am not going to have a baby."

At first he did not understand her. He thought that the sight of blood had shaken her nerves and that she was recurring to the distaste for motherhood that she had expressed to him in Aiken.

"Don't worry, dearie," he said. "It can't be helped now, but there is really no reason for you to worry."

She did not look up, but she shook her head.

"I am not," she repeated.

He came to her, stood before her, and patted a little patch of her cheek, which her hands left bare.

"There, there," he said.

At his touch she broke into convulsive sobbing.