But she does not hear him.  She is looking into the distant corner of the room as though—­as one might suppose, seeing her earnest gaze—­she can there see something.  Her dead life’s hope, perhaps, lying in its shroud.  And perhaps, too, the sight is too much for her, for after a moment or two she raises her hands to her eyes, and clasps them there.

A sound breaks from her.  In all his after life Rylton never forgets it.

“Oh!” says she, and that is all—­but it sounds like a last breath—­a final moan—­an end.

Then all at once it is over.  Whatever she has felt is done with for the present.  She takes down her hands, and looks round at him deliberately.  Her face is as the face of one dead, but her voice is clear and cold and cutting as an east wind.

“It is this, then,” says she, “that all is at an end between us.  You have tired of me.  I have heard that men do tire.  Now I know it.  You wish me dead, perhaps.”

“No!  Marian, No!”

“For that, I suppose, I should thank you.  Thank the man who once wanted so much to make me his wife.  You did wish to make me—­your wife?”

“Yes—­yes.  But that is all over,” says he desperately.

“For you, yes!  For me——­”

She pauses.

“Great heavens!” cries Rylton.  “Why go on like this?  Why go into it again?  Was it my fault?  At that time I was a poor man.  I laid my heart at your feet, but”—­drawing a long breath—­“I was a poor man.  It all lay in that.”

“Ah!  You will throw that in my teeth always,” says she—­not violently now, not even with a touch of excitement, but slowly, evenly.  “Even in the days to come.  Yet it was not that that killed your love for me.  There was something else.  Go on.  Let me hear it.”

“There is nothing to hear.  I beg of you, Marian, to——­”

“To let you off?” says she, with a ghastly attempt at gaiety.  “No, don’t hope for that.  There is something—­something that has cost me—­everything.  And I will learn it.  No one’s love dies without a cause.  And there is a cause for the death of yours.  Be frank with me, now, in this our last hour.  Make me a confession.”

Five minutes ago she would have thrown her arms round him, and besought him, with tender phrases, to tell her what is on his mind.  Now she stands apart from him, with a cold, lifeless smile upon her still colder lips.

“No!  Do not perjure yourself,” says she quickly, seeing him about to speak.  “Do you think I do not know?  That I cannot see by your face that there is something?  I have studied it quite long enough to understand it.  Come, Maurice.  The past is the past—­you have decided that—­and it is a merely curious mood that leads me to ask you the secret of the great crime that has separated us. My crime, bien entendu!"

Rylton turns away from her with an impatient gesture, and goes back to the hearthrug.  To persist like this!  It is madness!