The Other had gone from her world, and now he was going.  Her mind shrank from the new and utter desolation....  The night seemed closing about her, as she stood beside the gate.  Like some great foreign elemental, it was, until she was near to screaming, and perceived herself captive to madness—­a broken-nerved creature in a strange place, stifling among aliens, undone in the torment of strange stars....  And, another, the ancient terror to strong women, now fell upon her, to show Beth Truba how mighty she was to suffer.  The sense of her own fruitlessness drove home to her breast, of living without solution, realizing that all her fluent emotions, lovely ideals, all her sympathies, dreams and labors, should end with her own tired hands; that she must know the emptiness of every aspiration, while half-finished women everywhere were girdled with children....  He was coming toward her.

That instant, a merciful blankness fell upon her mind.  Out of the fury and maiming, her consciousness seemed lifted to some cool blackness.  There was just one vague, almost primal, instinct, such as a babe must feel—­the need to be taken in his arms.  The wall between them would have fallen had Bedient done that, but nothing was further from his thoughts.  He, too, was groping in terrible darkness.  Her spirit was lost to him....  There was no moonlight, so he could not discern the anguish of her face, and the sense of her suffering blended with his own....  A very wise woman has said that it isn’t a woman’s mysteries which dismay and mislead a man, but her contradictions.

“And now tell me the rest, Beth,” he said quickly, looking down into the pale blur which was her face.  “I must know.”

She shivered slightly.  She was dazed.  Hatred for the moment, hatred for self and the world, for him, imperiously pinning her to the old sorrow; his failure to make a child of her, as a lover of less integrity might have done—­it was all a sickening botch, about Wordling’s pretty taunting face.  She had not the strength of faculty to tear down and build again the better way.

“You were telling me that he was your work—­of his face and all,” Bedient whispered.

“Oh, yes....  Oh, yes, and you went away——­”

“Yes,” he said strangely.

“I must have been dreaming....  It hurt me so—­he hurt me so.  I remember——­”

And now a cold gray light dawned in her brain, and the old story cleared—­the old worn grooves were easily followed.

“Yes.”

“But I—­perhaps—­I was inexorable.”  There was something eerie in that touch which held her for an instant.

“But you started to tell me more about him, I’m sure, at first,” Bedient said.  The idea in his brain needed this.

“I helped him in his studies,” she answered angrily.  There was something morbid to her in Bedient’s intensity.  “I helped him in the world, or friends of mine did.  Yes, I made his way among men until he could stand alone.  And he did, quickly.  He was bright.  Even his refinements of dress and manner and English—­I undertook at the beginning.”