Swinging around a sharp curve, the car lurched violently, and she staggered. He caught her arm and led her to the seat, where she leaned her head against the panel and shut her eyes. Singularly beautiful was the proud face wearing the pathetic seal of mental suffering, but, as he looked down at her, no pity softened the gleam in his eyes, and his hands clinched in his struggle for self-control. "To-night I have learned how a man feels when an angel he worshipped from afar stooped from her heights, led him up, up to the open gate of heaven, and, just as he was entering, the same angelic hand dropped him into hell. When I had abandoned all hope of winning you, the suddenness of your surrender made my head reel. I was amazed; but the possibility that you deliberately planned to deceive me no more occurred to me than would an insult to my dead mother. For me you have embodied all that I hold pure, lofty, refined, admirable in womanhood. I was fastidious, but you filled my ideal, and I trusted you almost as I trust my God. You have wronged me doubly--in the loss of yourself, but far worse in the destruction of my belief in the incorruptibility of some women; sooner or later all are for sale. "If I had sailed away before seeing you at Y---- I should have carried an unsullied, a perfect, sacred memory of you to light the long Arctic night. God knows I would sooner have died there than realize you cruelly, deliberately deceived me. You thought you were buying the papers; but, as they will not be delivered, the trade is off. You cannot get possession of what you purchased, and the price paid I here return to you. You have no papers, and I have no wife. Without value received on your part, I have no right to you, and we stand now just as we did before that marriage ceremony, which has proved a mere commercial mockery. I abhor shams--above all things sham marriage. All or none. Only very strong, deep, tender love justifies a woman in giving herself away. Otherwise the relation degrades her; she is little better than an odalisque; and such I decline to see you. For me you have no love--never will have--and as regards my own wishes, your duplicity has effectually slain what once warmed my heart. After a few days, relief for both of us will come in separation. If I never return you will escape much annoyance. When two years elapse, the divorce court cannot refuse to give you freedom from nominal bonds, and then you will soon forget that you were ever--even in name--my wife." She had grown ghastly pale, and her lips fluttered. In the brief silence a sick child's fretful cry rolled through the adjoining sleeper, then the train thundered into a tunnel. "Mr. Herriott, I am so utterly miserable cruel words, even from you, no longer have power to wound me. I--" She laughed nervously, and sat upright.