She paused long on her answer. At last she spoke quietly, in a friendly voice. "Yes, I'll shake hands with you, Harry. Because it's all over." She smiled faintly. "I'll shake hands with you if Andy will let me." "If Andy--?" "Yes; because my hand belongs to him now. I came here to tell him so this morning." She passed her left arm through Andy's and held out her right hand towards Harry. Her lips quivered as she looked up for a moment at Andy's face. He patted her hand gently, but his eyes were set on Harry Belfield. The hand she offered Harry did not take. He stretched out his for his hat, and picked it up from the table in a shaking grip. The smile had gone from his lips; his eyes were heavy and resentful; he found no more eloquent, appropriate words. "Oh, so that's it?" he said with a sullen sneer. "It's none of it been of my seeking," Andy protested again. In this last moment of the fight the old feeling came strong upon him. He pleaded that he had been loyal to Harry, that he was no usurper; it had never been in his mind. Harry stood in silence, fingering his hat. He cast a glance across at them--where they stood opposite to him, side by side, her arm in Andy's. Very fresh across his memory struck the look on her face--the trustful happiness which had followed on the tremulous joy evoked by his wonderful words. It was not his nor for him any more, that look. He hated that it should be Andy's. He gave the old impatient protesting shrug of his shoulders. What other comment was there to make? He was what he was--and these things happened! The Restless Master plays these disconcerting tricks on his devoted servants. "Well, good-bye," he mumbled. "Good-bye, Harry," said both, she in her clear soft voice, Andy in his weightier note, both with a grave pity which recognised, even as did his shrug of the shoulders, that there was no more to be said. It was just good-bye, just a parting of the ways, a severing of lives. Even good wishes would have seemed a mockery; from neither side were they offered. With one more look, another slightest shrug, Harry Belfield turned his back on them. They stood without moving till the door closed behind him. He was gone. Andy gave a deep sigh and dropped into the arm-chair by his office desk. Vivien bent over him, her hand on his shoulder. "Why did you let me meet him, Andy?" Andy was long in answering. He was revolving the processes of his own mind, the impulse under which he had acted, why he had exposed her to such an ordeal as had once been in the day's work at Nutley. "It was a chance, your coming while he was here, we three being here together. But since it happened like that"--he raised his eyes to hers--"well, I just thought that neither of us ought to funk him." The utterance seemed a simple result of so much cogitation. But Vivien laughed softly as she daintily and daringly laid her hand on Andy's big head.