"Elizabeth!" he protested; "you are an angel, and I love you--no man ever loved a woman as I love you." In her abasement she never thought of reproaching him, of saying "if you loved me, why did you betray me?" She had not gone as far as that yet. Her fall had been so tremendous that if she had any feeling about him, it was nothing more than the consciousness that he too, had gone over the precipice. "Please go away," she said. "Dearest, listen; you are my wife. If--if I hurried you too much, you will forgive me because I loved you so? I didn't dare to wait, for fear--" he stumbled on the confession which his god had wrung from him, but which must not be made to her. Elizabeth's heavy eyes were suddenly keen. "Fear of what?" "Oh, don't look at me that way! I love you so that it kills me to have you angry at me!" "I am not angry with you," she said, faintly surprised; "why should I be angry with _you_? Only, you see, Blair, I--I can't live. I simply can't live." "You have got to live!--or I'll die," he said. "I love you, I tell you I love you!" His outstretched, trembling hands entreated hers, but she would not yield them to his touch; her shrinking movement away from him, her hands gripped together at her throat, filled him with absolute terror: "Elizabeth! _don't_--" She glanced at him with stony eyes. Blair was suffering. Why should _he_ suffer? But his suffering did not interest her. "Please go away," she said, heavily. He went. He dared not stay. He left her, going miserably down-stairs to make a pretense of eating some breakfast. But all the while he was arranging entreaties and arguments in his own mind. He went to the door of their room a dozen times that morning, but it was locked. No, she did not want any breakfast. Wouldn't she come out and walk? No, no, no. Please let her alone. And then in the afternoon; "Elizabeth, I _must_ come in! You must have some food." She let him enter; but she was indifferent alike to the food and to the fact that by this time there was, of course, a giggling consciousness in the hotel that the "bride and groom had had a rumpus." ... "A nice beginning for a honeymoon," said the chambermaid, "locking that pretty young man out of her room!--and me with my work to do in there. Well, I'm sorry for him; I bet you she's a case." Blair, too, was indifferent to anything ridiculous in his position; the moment was too critical for such self-consciousness. When at last he took a little tray of food to his wife, and knelt beside her, begging her to eat, he was appalled at the ruin in her face. She drank some tea to please him; then she said, pitifully: "What shall we do, Blair?" That she should say "we" showed that these hours which had plowed her face had also sowed some seed of unselfishness in her broken soul. "Darling," he said, tenderly, "have you forgiven me?"