She stood there a long time staring down at a letter that, of its own power it seemed, stood out apart and separated from all the rest. She did not touch the letter. There was no power in her, nor no wish, to turn a page of it. It had no envelope. And it had, with insensate malice, spread out the whole of its front page to her eye. It was a love letter, one link of a chain of established correspondence between a woman and Jimmie Wardwell. After the first, heart-withering look at the page which gave her this complete, all-embracing intelligence, Augusta did not read. She stood staring dumbly, and then, still keeping her eyes helplessly on the page, she began to back, step by step, cowering away from it. Creeping backward still, she came against the chair on which she had thrown her dress. Her hand went out mechanically and she grasped the dress, just where she had stuck the forgotten needle in it. The pain of the piercing needle mercifully took her eyes away from that letter. She pulled the needle from where it had stuck in the palm of her hand, and mechanically brought the hurt up to her lips. Then she looked at the dress. What was it doing there? Oh yes! She remembered. She was going away. She had always known that she was going away. Now it was the time. She took the dress and carried it over behind the little curtain of her hammock bed. When she was ready to go, she sat down at the typewriter and wrote a line in the middle of a clean sheet of paper. She was not herself, of course; and we do not know just what was passing in her mind. But she wrote: _We may not live together. We shall not die apart._ As she rose from the typewriter she looked again, because she could not help it, at the letter, and in the lower part of the page that lay open before her she saw clearly the words "your Jean." She did not need these words to tell her what she already knew, that the letter was from the woman with whom Jimmie had promised to have nothing to do. For she had already seen, in the first moment, a flash of the woman's dark, handsome, discontented face. But the written words, the written claim, roused in her a swelling, choking anger. She would not go away! She would stay and _fight_ that women to the death for her love! Yet all the time she knew that she would go. It was inevitable, as her heart had always somehow told her that this hour would inevitably come. Except for his broken promise--That was unanswerable--she had no heart to blame Jimmie. She would not go in anger. In her heart she had sworn that, if this day should come, she would free him completely, and without bitterness. She was going. Her love was spoiled, tarnished; another had touched it. She could never again have the glory of it. Dear heart of life, how beautiful it had been! And she must go, lest in her weakness she should grovel and bring that one beautiful thing of life down into dust with her.