With these last words, gasped forth on rising sobs, Madame von Marwitz sank into the chair where Karen still leaned and broke into passionate tears. Gregory again was smiling, with the smile now of decorum at bay, of embarrassment rather than contempt; but to Karen's eyes it was the smile of supercilious arrogance. She looked at him sternly over her guardian's bowed and oddly rolling head. "Speak, Gregory! Speak!" she commanded. "My dear," said Gregory--their voices seemed to pass above the clash and uproar of stormy waters, Madame von Marwitz had abandoned herself to an elemental grief--"I have nothing to say to your guardian." "To me, then," Karen clenched her hands on the back of the chair; "to me, then, you have something to say. Is it not true? Have you not repulsed her efforts to come near you? Have you not, behind her back, permitted yourself to speak with scorn of the man she hoped I would marry?" Gregory paused, and in the pause, as he observed, Madame von Marwitz was able to withhold for a moment her strange groans and gaspings while she listened. "I don't think there has been any such effort," he said. "We were both keeping up appearances, your guardian and I; and I think that I kept them up best. As for Herr Lippheim, it was only when you accused me of rudeness to him that I confessed how much it astonished me to find that he was the man your guardian had wished you to marry. It does astonish me. Herr Lippheim isn't even a gentleman." "Enough!" cried Madame von Marwitz. She sprang to her feet. "Enough!" she said, half suffocated. "It is the voice of the cage! We will not stay to hear its standards applied. Come with me, Karen, that I may say farewell to you." She caught Karen by the arm. Her face was strange, savage, suffused. Gregory went to open the door for them. "Base one!" she said to him. "Ignominious one!" She drew Karen swiftly along the passage and, still keeping her sharp clasp of her wrist while she opened and closed the door of her room, she sank, encircling her with her arms, upon the sofa, and wept loudly over her. Karen, too, was now weeping; heavy, shaking sobs. "My child! My poor child!" Madame von Marwitz murmured brokenly after a little time had gone. "I would have spared you this. It has come. We have both seen it. And now, so that your life may not be ruined, I must leave it." "But Tante--my Tante--" sobbed Karen--Madame von Marwitz did not remember that Karen had ever so sobbed before--"you cannot mean those words. What shall I do if you say this? What is left for me?" "My child, your life is left you," said Madame von Marwitz, holding her close and speaking with her lips in the girl's hair. "Your husband's love is left; the happiness that you chose and that I shall shatter if I stay; ah, yes, my Karen, how deny it now? I see my path. It is plain before me. To-night I go to Mrs. Forrester and to-morrow I breathe the air of Cornwall."