“Cicely, Cis, my Holly, don’t, don’t, for the love of justice, for the love of me, benumb yourself with such idiocy! I have no wife! Cis, listen! _I--have--no--wife!_ Will you leave me?” Rodney cried, leaping to his feet, for Cis had risen. “You can’t! Throw over the Church! Come to me! You love me; I worship you. I need you. Cis, are you utterly heartless? Church or me, and you hesitate! Me, your husband! Oh, Cis, look at this home of ours; stay in it!” Cis lifted both arms toward heaven with a great, tragic gesture, and turned in silence toward the door. Rodney leaped to reach it before her, but she raised her hand and looked at him. Her blanched face, surmounted by her glowing hair was deathlike and awful; it made Rodney fall back to let her pass, afraid to check her. “I will go away to think. I can’t think now. I will send you word when I know. I may come back. I cannot think. You have killed my brain. I don’t know--but you have a living wife! I will go away to think. Let me go, alone. I must go--alone. There is not even Cis Adair left to go with me. How strange to come alive and go out dead! Your wife is alive. Good-bye. Let me pass.” Cis spoke slowly, with great difficulty, yet clearly, and Rodney, awed and conscience-stricken to see her thus, fell back and let her go. Afterward he marvelled that he had done so, and cursed his folly, but under the spell of Cicely’s eyes he could not do otherwise. CHAPTER XIII DARKNESS Cicely came out into the golden weather of that belated St. Martin’s Summer day which she had said had been sent to bless her path to her new home. The sunshine was as warm, the air as soft, the sky as beautifully blue as when she had crossed the threshold of her paradise, from which horror and her stumbling conscience were driving her, but she saw nothing of the beauty around her. Shut into her own mind, she walked unseeing, unaware, the interior darkness not lifting even so much as to reveal to her what and why she suffered. Or did she suffer? Something had happened to her; everything was obliterated; pain was not conscious to her, nor loss, but in a vacuum that forbade breath, in a pit without ray or exit, she walked the Beaconhite streets, not knowing where she went, nor whom she passed. Something repeated ceaselessly: “A wife. A wife, alive; he has a wife. He is married.” She did not know why she so insisted upon this; it tired her, and many men had a wife. Who was it that had one whose having one so mattered to her?