She turned her head slightly away, as though interested in the passing throng. No flush of color tinged her cheeks. Her straight, firm lips never trembled. He tried to take her hand,--small it was, and encased in old, neatly-mended gloves. She drew it quietly but firmly away. She remained silent. "Perhaps I have no right," he continued, "to remind you of these things, but neither have you the right to deny our later meeting. You are playing some sort of a game with me," he continued, a little roughly, "and your methods, whatever they may be, include a lie. Therefore, I myself take license." "If you have quite finished, Mr. Deane," she said, "I should be glad. My visit to you, and all the circumstances connected with it, is one of the things which I wish to forget." "To relegate to the same place in your memory," he remarked, "as your brief essay in the rôle of a chambermaid." She leaned out of the window. "Here we are," she remarked. "I am anxious about my brother. Please hurry." CHAPTER III A PAINFUL INTERVIEW Rowan sat still in his corner, and although the hotel could not be called fashionable--perhaps, in these later days, scarcely luxurious--the little ebb and flow of life upon which he looked seemed tinged with a peculiar bitterness. His hollow eyes followed each group of these men and women, so full of vivacity, of happiness, of affairs. The envy in his heart was like a real and passionate thing. It was an envy scarcely founded upon comparisons. For them was life,--for him was none! In front of him always was that ghastly, unchanging verdict: a month--two at the most--thirty days of ill-health, of suffering, of weakness, and after that--what? He caught his breath with a little shudder, and calling a passing waiter, ordered some brandy. He looked around and longed to find someone to speak to, someone to occupy his attention for a single moment, to stop the flow of gruesome fancies which seemed always biting their way into his brain. He had faced death readily enough in those old days, when Deane and he had ridden side by side, and the bullets had whizzed around them like rain, and the dead men lay in heaps. But this was different! The blood ran warm in their veins then, their hearts were strong. He had no strength now to battle with these fancies, no strength to do anything but cower before the slowly coming, grisly shadow of his fate. He looked continually at the door, longing always for the return of his sister and the coming of Deane. Even the prison hospital was better than this. A girl passed by, young and beautiful, carrying in her arms a little dog. She threw a compassionate glance at Rowan, and he felt the sweat break out upon his forehead. It was too awful, this! He was rising to his feet even as Deane and his sister entered the lounge. He moved toward them with uncertain footsteps. "We must have a sitting-room," he said. "I cannot face these people. I am beginning to feel a coward."