“Hugh, dear, if it’s hard for you, try to understand that it’s terrible for me to think that he has any claim at all.  I realize now, as I never did before, how wicked it was in me to marry him.  I hate him, I can’t bear the thought of going near him.”

She fell into wild weeping.  I tried to comfort her, who could not comfort myself; I don’t remember my inadequate words.  We were overwhelmed, obliterated by the sense of calamity....  It was she who checked herself at last by an effort that was almost hysterical.

“I mustn’t yield to it!” she said.  “It’s time to leave and the train goes at six.  No, you mustn’t come to the station, Hugh—­I don’t think I could stand it.  I’ll send you a telegram.”  She rose.  “You must go now—­you must.”

“You’ll come back to me?” I demanded thickly, as I held her.

“Hugh, I am yours, now and always.  How can you doubt it?”

At last I released her, when she had begged me again.  And I found myself a little later walking past the familiar, empty houses of those streets....

The front pages of the evening newspapers announced the accident to Hambleton Durrett, and added that Mrs. Durrett, who had been lingering in the city, had gone to her husband’s bedside.  The morning papers contained more of biography and ancestry, but had little to add to the bulletin; and there was no lack of speculation at the Club and elsewhere as to Ham’s ability to rally from such a shock.  I could not bear to listen to these comments:  they were violently distasteful to me.  The unforeseen accident and Nancy’s sudden departure had thrown my life completely out of gear:  I could not attend to business, I dared not go away lest the news from Nancy be delayed.  I spent the hours in an exhausting mental state that alternated between hope and fear, a state of unmitigated, intense desire, of balked realization, sometimes heightening into that sheer terror I had felt when I had detected over the telephone that note in her voice that seemed of despair.  Had she had a presentiment, all along, that something would occur to separate us?  As I went back over the hours we had passed together since she had acknowledged her love, in spite of myself the conviction grew on me that she had never believed in the reality of our future.  Indeed, she had expressed her disbelief in words.  Had she been looking all along for a sign—­a sign of wrath?  And would she accept this accident of Ham’s as such?

Retrospection left me trembling and almost sick.

It was not until the second morning after her departure that I received a telegram giving the name of her Boston hotel, and saying that there was to be a consultation that day, and as soon as it had taken place she would write.  Such consolation as I could gather from it was derived from four words at the end,—­she missed me dreadfully.  Some tremor of pity for her entered into my consciousness, without mitigating greatly the wildness of my resentment, of my forebodings.