“Hush!” he said quickly, with a forward movement, “hush! you shall not think such things!”

“The taste would come back again!” she repeated, with a kind of savage sternness.  “I am not strong and the doctor told me long ago that there was no cure.”

“Then he lied—­there is always a cure.”

“There is not—­there is not,” she insisted harshly, dwelling upon the words because in them she found a keen agony which relieved her lethargy of bitterness, “I am different now for a while, but it would not last.  I am very tired, but after I have rested—­”

“What would not last?” he broke in, as she hesitated over her unfinished sentence.

For a long pause she waited, searching in vain, he saw, for some phrase which might describe the thing she had not as yet thought out clearly in her own dazed mind.  Then, at last, she spoke almost in a whisper, “the freedom.”

The word gave him a sudden shock of gladness.  “Then you are free to-day—­you feel it now?”

She raised her hand, pushing back her faded hair, as if she would look more closely at an object which rose but dimly before her eyes.

“I want you to know all—­everything,” she went on slowly, “I want you to understand how low I sank—­to what fearful places I came in the end.  At first it was merely discontent, and I felt that it was only happiness I wanted.  I loved him—­for a time, I think, I really loved him—­you know whom I mean—­but at last, when I began to weary him, when he knew what I took, he cursed me and left me alone in the street one night.  Then a devil was let loose within me—­I wanted hell, and I went further—­further.”

Her voice was still lifeless, but while she spoke he felt his teeth bite into his lips with a force which stung him to the consciousness of what she said.  There awoke in him a triumph, almost a glory in the rage he felt, and he knew now why men had always believed in a hell—­why they had even come at last to hope for it.

“I never meant to come back,” she began again, after a pause in which the tumult of his feeling seemed to fill the air with violence, “but I had reached the end of wretchedness, I was tired and hungry, and nothing that happened really mattered.  If you had told me to go away I don’t think that I should have cared.  I meant, in that case, to sell my coat for a bottle of brandy, and to put an end to it all while I had the courage of drink.”

Her bent disordered head trembled slightly, but she appeared to him to have passed in her misery beyond the bounds where any human sympathy could be of use.  She was no longer his wife, nor he her husband; she was no longer even a fellow mortal between whom and himself there might be some common ground of understanding.  Absolutely alone and unapproachable, he knew that she had reached the ultimate desolation of her soul.

“It was because you did not send me away that I have told you,” she said quietly.  “It is because, too, I want you to know that I—­understand.”