His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder.  She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches.  It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.

It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light.  He went up to his friend and took her hand.

“You would do it—­you would do it!”

She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

“Good-by,” he said, kissing it.

“Good-by?  You are going—?”

“To get my letter.”

“Your letter?  The letter won’t matter, if you will only do what I ask.”

He returned her gaze.  “I might, I suppose, without being out of character.  Only, don’t you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?”

“Harm her?”

“To sacrifice you wouldn’t make me different.  I shall go on being what I have always been—­sifting and sorting, as she calls it.  Do you want my punishment to fall on her?”

She looked at him long and deeply.  “Ah, if I had to choose between you—!”

“You would let her take her chance?  But I can’t, you see.  I must take my punishment alone.”

She drew her hand away, sighing.  “Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you.”

“For either of us?  There will be the reading of her letter for me.”

She shook her head with a slight laugh.  “There will be no letter.”

Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look.  “No letter?  You don’t mean—­”

“I mean that she’s been with you since I saw her—­she’s seen you and heard your voice.  If there is a letter, she has recalled it—­from the first station, by telegraph.”

He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile.  “But in the mean while I shall have read it,” he said.

The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.

THE QUICKSAND

I

AS Mrs. Quentin’s victoria, driving homeward, turned from the Park into Fifth Avenue, she divined her son’s tall figure walking ahead of her in the twilight.  His long stride covered the ground more rapidly than usual, and she had a premonition that, if he were going home at that hour, it was because he wanted to see her.