Julia remained motionless. “What course is that?” she asked. He cleared his throat. “I mean to claim the fulfilment of your promise.” For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered a torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her surroundings pressed upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant of sunlight on the wall, the hardness of the chair-arms that she grasped, were a separate wound to each sense. “My promise--” she faltered. “Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one or the other should wish to be released.” She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: “You acknowledge the agreement?” The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head to it proudly. “I acknowledge the agreement,” she said. “And--you don’t mean to repudiate it?” A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced and pushed it back. “No,” she answered slowly, “I don’t mean to repudiate it.” There was a pause. He remained near the hearth, his elbow resting on the mantel-shelf. Close to his hand stood a little cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding anniversaries. She wondered vaguely if he noticed it. “You intend to leave me, then?” she said at length. His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion. “To marry some one else?” Again his eye and hand protested. She rose and stood before him. “Why should you be afraid to tell me? Is it Una Van Sideren?” He was silent. “I wish you good luck,” she said. III She looked up, finding herself alone. She did not remember when or how he had left the room, or how long afterward she had sat there. The fire still smouldered on the hearth, but the slant of sunlight had left the wall. Her first conscious thought was that she had not broken her word, that she had fulfilled the very letter of their bargain. There had been no crying out, no vain appeal to the past, no attempt at temporizing or evasion. She had marched straight up to the guns. Now that it was over, she sickened to find herself alive. She looked about her, trying to recover her hold on reality. Her identity seemed to be slipping from her, as it disappears in a physical swoon. “This is my room--this is my house,” she heard herself saying. Her room? Her house? She could almost hear the walls laugh back at her.