“So that’s why you decided to go away,” he said.

He had been nerving himself during a long slow silence for that.  He could almost as easily have struck her a blow, and indeed the effect of it was precisely that.  But though she tried to shrink away he held her tighter and went on.  “I don’t believe there’s anything in the whole picture now that I don’t see and understand.  But—­but the way out ...  Oh, Mary darling, it isn’t the one you are trying to take.  There’s happiness for both of us if you’ll take the other way—­with me.”

She was struggling now to get free from his hands.  “No!” she gasped wildly.  “I won’t do that.  I’ll do anything—­anything else rather than that.  Let me go now.”

But he held her fast.  Presently she relaxed and lay back panting in her chair.  “Won’t you please let me go?” she pleaded.  “You haven’t understood at all if you don’t see that you must.  Oh, but you do understand!  You’ve comforted me ...  I didn’t think there could be any comfort like that.  Let me go now—­in peace.  Don’t ask the other.  I’ve spoiled things for everybody else, but I won’t for you.  I couldn’t endure that.”

All the pleas, the arguments, the convincing phrases which he had been mustering while she talked to him so contentedly, to convince her of the truth, the blinding truth that he wanted her now for his wife, that life no longer seemed a possible thing for him upon any other terms—­all that feeble scaffolding of words was, to his despair, swept now clean away in the very torrent of his passion.  He could do nothing for a while but go on holding her.  At last, words burst from him.

“I won’t let you go.  Not alone.  Wherever you go, I’ll go with you.”

She looked up, staring into his face and he saw an incredulous surmise deepen into certainty.  She had seen, heard in that cry of his, the truth—­that he understood what she meant to do.  Then her face contorted itself like a child’s, ineffectually struggling to keep back tears, and she broke down, weeping.

That broke the spell that had fallen upon him.  He took her up, carried her over to the big armchair and sat down with her in his arms.

His own terror, which had never more than momentarily receded since she had first spoken to him from the doorway, was, he realized, gone; replaced by an inexplicable thrilling confidence that he had won his victory.  He didn’t speak a word.

The tempest was soon spent.  It was a matter only of minutes before the sobbing ceased.  But for a long while after she was quiet, all muscles relaxed, she lay just as he held her, a soft dead weight like a sleeping child.  He wondered, indeed, if she had not fallen asleep and finally moved his head so that he could see her eyes.  They were open, though, and at that movement of his she stirred, sighed and sat erect.

“I think I would have dropped off in another minute,” she said.  Then she put her hands upon his shoulders.  “I won’t do that.  I promise, solemnly, I won’t do what—­what we both thought I meant to do.  I don’t believe I could now, anyway.  Now that the nightmare is gone.”