“No more,” said she, and in her voice sounded a command he knew, at last, was quite inexorable.  “I’m not like other women of our set, perhaps.  I can’t be bought and sold, Wally, with money and position.  I can’t marry a man, and have to live with him, if he shows himself petty, or small, or narrow in any way.  I must be free, free as air, as long as I live.  Even in marriage, I must be free.  Freedom can only come with the union of two souls that understand and help and inspire each other.  Anything else is slavery—­and worse!”

She shuddered, and for a moment turned half away from him, as, now contrite enough for the minute, he stood there looking at her with dazed eyes.  For a second the idea came to him that he must take her in his arms, there in the edge of the woods, burn kisses on her ripe mouth, win her back to him by force, as he had won all life’s battles.  He would not, could not, let this prize escape him now.  A wave of desire surged through his being.  He took a step toward her, his trembling arms open to seize her lithe, seductive body.  But she, retreating, held him away with repellant palms.

“No, no, no!” she cried.  “Not now—­never that, any more!  I must be free, Wally—­free as air!”

She raised her face toward the vast reaches of the sky, breathed deep and for a moment closed her eyes, as though bathing her very soul in the sweet freedom of the out-of-doors.

“Free as air!” she whispered.  “Let me go!”

He started violently.  Her simile had struck him like a lash.

“Free—­as what?” he exclaimed hoarsely.  “As air?  But—­but there’s no such freedom, I tell you!  Air isn’t free any more—­or won’t be, soon!  It will be everything, anything but free, before another year is gone!  Free as air?  You—­you don’t understand!  Your father and I—­we shall soon own the air.  Free as air?  Yes, if you like!  For that—­that means you, too, must belong to me!”

Again he sought to take her, to hold her and overmaster her.  But she, now wide-eyed with a kind of sudden terror at this latest outbreak, this seeming madness on his part, which she could nowise fathom or comprehend, retreated ever more and more, away from him.

Then suddenly with a quick effort, she stripped off the splendid, blazing diamond from her finger, and held it out to him.

“Wally,” said she, calm now and quite herself again, “Wally, let’s be friends.  Just that and nothing more.  Dear, good, companionable friends, as we used to be, long years ago, before this madness seized us—­this chimera of—­of love!”

As a bull charging, is struck to the heart by the sword of the matador, and stops in his tracks, motionless and dazed before he falls, so “Tiger” Waldron stopped, wholly stunned by this abrupt and crushing denouement.

For a moment, man and woman faced each other.  Not a word was spoken.  Catherine had no word to say; and Waldron, though his lips worked, could bring none to utterance.  Then their eyes met; and his lowered.