The appeal went out into silence.  Carey neither spoke nor moved.  His face was like a stone mask—­the face of a strong man in torture.

After a pause of seconds she spoke again, her face hidden from him.

“The first Mrs. Coningsby is dead,” she said.  “Let it be so!  Nothing will ever bring her back.  Geoffrey Coningsby is free to marry—­whom he will.”

The words were scarcely more than a whisper, but they reached and pierced him to the heart.  He drew a step nearer to her, and spoke with sudden vehemence.

“I would help you, Heaven knows, if I could!  But you will see—­you must see presently—­that I have no choice.  There is only one thing to be done, and it has fallen to me to see it through, though it would be easier for me to die!”

He broke off.  There was strangled passion in his voice.  Abruptly he turned his back upon her, and began to pace up and down.  Again there fell a long pause.  The music and the tramp of dancing feet below rose up in his ears like a shout of mockery.  He was fighting the hardest battle of his life, fighting single-handed and grievously wounded for a victory that would cripple him for the rest of his days.

Suddenly he stood still and looked at her, though she had not moved, unless her head with its silvery hair were bowed a little lower than before.  For a single instant he hesitated, then strode impulsively to her, and knelt down by her side.

“God help us both!” he said hoarsely.

His hands were on her shoulders.  He drew her to him, taking the bowed head upon his breast.  And so, silently, he held her.  When she looked up at last, he knew that the bitter triumph was his.  Her face was deathly, but her eyes were steadfast.  She drew herself very gently out of his hold.

“I do not think,” she said, “that there is anyone else in the world who could have done for me what you have done tonight.”  She paused a moment looking straight into his eyes, then laid her hands in his without a quiver.  “Years ago,” she said, “you saved my life.  Tonight—­you have saved something infinitely more precious than that.  And I—­I am grateful to you.  I will do—­whatever you think right.”

It was a free surrender, but it wrung his heart to accept it.  Even in that moment of tragedy there was to him something of that sublime courage with which she had faced the tumult of a stormy sea with him five years before.  And very poignantly it came home to him that he was there to destroy and not to deliver.  Like a wave of evil, it rushed upon him, overwhelming him.

He could not trust himself to speak.  The wild words that ran in his brain were such as he could not utter.  And so he only bent his head once more over the hands that lay so trustingly in his, and with great reverence he kissed them.

VIII