He turned around without moving from his place.  “And in that case there’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t go back?” he concluded for her.

Her eyes were clinging to him desperately.  “Oh, is there no reason?”

“Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage.  My marriage,” he said savagely, “isn’t going to be a sight to keep you here.”  She made no answer, and he went on:  “What’s the use?  You gave me my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to go on with a sham one.  It’s beyond human enduring—­that’s all.”

“Oh, don’t say that; when I’m enduring it!” she burst out, her eyes filling.

Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.  The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with the soul behind it:  Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly told him.

“You too—­oh, all this time, you too?”

For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly downward.

Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any show of moving.  Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence:  he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept his eye on it in order not to look at her face.  Now his imagination spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no effort to draw nearer.  He had known the love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not to be superficially satisfied.  His one terror was to do anything which might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought, that he should never again feel quite alone.

But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him.  There they were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world apart.

“What’s the use—­when you will go back?” he broke out, a great hopeless how on earth can I keep you? crying out to her beneath his words.

She sat motionless, with lowered lids.  “Oh—­I shan’t go yet!”

“Not yet?  Some time, then?  Some time that you already foresee?”

At that she raised her clearest eyes.  “I promise you:  not as long as you hold out.  Not as long as we can look straight at each other like this.”

He dropped into his chair.  What her answer really said was:  “If you lift a finger you’ll drive me back:  back to all the abominations you know of, and all the temptations you half guess.”  He understood it as clearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacred submission.