“All this means that you are going to desert me again?” I said with contempt.  “All right.  I won’t throw stones after you . . .  Are you going, then?”

She lowered her head slowly with a backward gesture of her arm as if to keep me off, for I had sprung to my feet all at once as if mad.

“Then go quickly,” I said.  “You are afraid of living flesh and blood.  What are you running after?  Honesty, as you say, or some distinguished carcass to feed your vanity on?  I know how cold you can be—­and yet live.  What have I done to you?  You go to sleep in my arms, wake up and go away.  Is it to impress me?  Charlatanism of character, my dear.”

She stepped forward on her bare feet as firm on that floor which seemed to heave up and down before my eyes as she had ever been—­ goatherd child leaping on the rocks of her native hills which she was never to see again.  I snatched the arrow of gold from the table and threw it after her.

“Don’t forget this thing,” I cried, “you would never forgive yourself for leaving it behind.”

It struck the back of the fur coat and fell on the floor behind her.  She never looked round.  She walked to the door, opened it without haste, and on the landing in the diffused light from the ground-glass skylight there appeared, rigid, like an implacable and obscure fate, the awful Therese—­waiting for her sister.  The heavy ends of a big black shawl thrown over her head hung massively in biblical folds.  With a faint cry of dismay Dona Rita stopped just within my room.

The two women faced each other for a few moments silently.  Therese spoke first.  There was no austerity in her tone.  Her voice was as usual, pertinacious, unfeeling, with a slight plaint in it; terrible in its unchanged purpose.

“I have been standing here before this door all night,” she said.  “I don’t know how I lived through it.  I thought I would die a hundred times for shame.  So that’s how you are spending your time?  You are worse than shameless.  But God may still forgive you.  You have a soul.  You are my sister.  I will never abandon you—­till you die.”

“What is it?” Dona Rita was heard wistfully, “my soul or this house that you won’t abandon.”

“Come out and bow your head in humiliation.  I am your sister and I shall help you to pray to God and all the Saints.  Come away from that poor young gentleman who like all the others can have nothing but contempt and disgust for you in his heart.  Come and hide your head where no one will reproach you—­but I, your sister.  Come out and beat your breast:  come, poor Sinner, and let me kiss you, for you are my sister!”

While Therese was speaking Dona Rita stepped back a pace and as the other moved forward still extending the hand of sisterly love, she slammed the door in Therese’s face.  “You abominable girl!” she cried fiercely.  Then she turned about and walked towards me who had not moved.  I felt hardly alive but for the cruel pain that possessed my whole being.  On the way she stooped to pick up the arrow of gold and then moved on quicker, holding it out to me in her open palm.