He smiled wryly as at some bitter memory.

“Perhaps I did,” he responded shortly.  “Death has its pains—­even the death of first love.  My love for you died hard, Elisabeth—­but it died.  You killed it.”

“And you will not do what I ask for the sake of the love you—­once—­gave me?” There was a desperate appeal in her low voice.

He shook his head.  “No,” he said, “I will not.”

She made a gesture of despair.

“Then you drive me into doing what I hate to do!” she exclaimed fiercely.  She was silent for a moment, standing with bowed head, her mouth working painfully.  Then, drawing herself up, she faced him again.  There was something in the lithe, swift movement that recalled a panther gathering itself together for its spring.

“Listen!” she said.  “If you will not find some means of breaking off your engagement with Sara, then I shall tell her the whole story—­tell her what manner of man it is she proposes to make her husband!”

There was a supreme challenge in her tones, and she waited for his answer defiantly—­her head flung back, her whole body braced, as it were, to resistance.

In the silence that followed, Trent drew away from her—­slowly, repugnantly, as though from something monstrous and unclean.

“You wouldn’t—­you couldn’t do such a thing!” he exclaimed in low, appalled tones of unbelief.

“I could!” she asserted, though her face whitened and her eyes flinched beneath his contemptuous gaze.

“But it would be a vile thing to do,” he pursued, still with that accent of incredulous abhorrence.  “Doubly vile for you to do this thing.”

“Do you think I don’t know that—­don’t realize it?” she answered desperately.  “You can say nothing that could make me think it worse than I do already.  It would be the basest action of which any woman could be guilty.  I recognize that.  And yet”—­she thrust her face, pinched and strained-looking, into his—­“and yet I shall do it.  I’d take that sin—­or any other—­on my conscience for the sake of Tim.”

Trent turned away from her with a gesture of defeat, and for a moment or two he paced silently backwards and forwards, while she watched him with burning eyes.

“Do you realize what it means?” she went on urgently.  “You have no way out.  You can’t deny the truth of what I have to tell.”

“No,” he acknowledged harshly.  “As you say, I cannot deny it.  No one knows that better than yourself.”

Suddenly he turned to her, and his face was that of a man in uttermost anguish of soul.  Beads of moisture rimmed his drawn mouth, and when he spoke his voice was husky and uneven.

“Haven’t I suffered enough—­paid enough?” he burst out passionately.  “You’ve had your pound of flesh.  For God’s sake, be satisfied with that!  Leave—­Garth Trent—­to build up what is left of his life in peace!”

The roughened, tortured tones seemed to unnerve her.  For a moment she hid her face in her hands, shuddering, and when she raised it again the tears were running down her cheeks.