Drawing up a chair, he sat down; then started upright again with dilating eyes and a strange shadow on his brow.  One of her arms lay uppermost and on the hand—­almost as fine as Lucie’s, but not quite,—­he saw the ring—­his ring, and it hung loosely.  The poor child was growing thin, very thin.  “If she were to hold her hand downward,” he muttered to himself, “I believe that ring would fall off.”  Did some stray glimpse of his own features, wearing a look never seen on them before, confront him from some near-by mirror that he started so guiltily as this heart murmur rose to his lips?  Or was it at a thought, hideous but tempting, which held him, gained upon him and soon absolutely possessed him, till his own hand went out stealthily and with hesitations toward those helpless fingers of hers, now approaching, now withdrawing, and now approaching them again but not touching them, great as his impulse was to do so, for fear she should wake, while yet the devil gripped his arm and lit up baleful fires in his eyes.

He had remembered those words of hers:  “Have you ever thought that with the exception of this ring no proof exists in all the world of our ever having been married?” Remember them?  He had not remembered them; he had heard them, sounding and resounding in his ears till the whole room seemed to palpitate with them.  Then the devil made his final move.  Ermentrude shuddered, and her position changing, the hand which had been uppermost fell down at her side and the ring slipped—­left her finger—­paused on the edge of the couch—­then came to rest in his palm held out to receive it.

He had not drawn it from her hand.  Fate had restored it.  As he forced himself to look at it lying in his grasp, a faintness as of death seized and held him for a moment; then this passed and he slowly rose and step by step with sidelong looks and hair starting upright on his forehead, like one who has walked in blood and sees the trail of guilt following him along the floor, he left her side—­he left the room—­he left the house—­and the rose-leaves fell about him once more, maddening him with their color, maddening him with the memories inseparable from their sweetness—­a sweetness which spoke of her, of love, and the attachment of a true heart destined to grieve for a little while at least, for he was never going back, never, never.

There was no eye to see, and no tongue to tell him that the seed, destined to flower into awful crime some dozen or more years later, put forth its first bud at this fatal hour.

* * * * *

He wrote her a letter.  He had the grace to do that.  Addressing her simply as Ermentrude, he told her that he had been called home to enter upon the serious business of life.  That he was not likely to come back, and as she was not really his wife, however pleasing the fiction had been in which they had both indulged, it seemed to him wiser to end their happy romance thus suddenly and while much of its glamour remained, than to linger on and see it decay day by day before their eyes till nothing but bitterness remained.  He loved her and felt the wrench more than she did, but duty and his obligations as a man, etc., etc., till it ended in his signature limited to initials like his love.