At this she meditated for a minute, staring with big, anguished eyes straight ahead of her at nothing; "I _think_ I have, Blair. I have tried to. Of course I know I was more wicked than you. It was more my doing than yours. Yes. I ought to ask you if you would forgive me." "Elizabeth! Forgive you? When you made me so happy! Am I to forgive you for making me happy?" "Blair," she said--she put the palms of her hands together, like a child; "Blair, please let me go." She looked at him with speechless entreaty. The old dominant Elizabeth was gone; here was nothing but the weak thing, the scared thing, pleading, crouching, begging for mercy. "Please, Blair, _please_--" But the very tragedy of such humbleness was that it made an appeal to passion rather than to mercy. It made him love her more, not pity her more. "I can't let you go, Elizabeth," he said, hoarsely; "I can't; I love you--I will never let you go! I will die before I will let you go!" With that cry of complete egotism from him, the storm which her egotism had let loose upon their little world broke over her own head. As the sense of the hopelessness of her position and the futility of her struggle dawned upon her, she grew frightened to the point of violence. She was outrageous in what she said to him--beating against the walls of this prison-house of marriage which she herself had reared about them, and crying wildly for freedom. Yet strangely enough, her fury was never the fury of temper; it was the fury of fear. In her voice there was a new note, a note of entreaty; she demanded, but not with the old invincible determination of the free Elizabeth. She was now only the woman pleading with the man; the wife, begging the husband. Through it all, her jailer, insulted, commanded, threatened, never lost a gentleness that had sprung up in him side by side with love. It was, of course, the gentleness of power, although he did not realize that, for he was abjectly frightened; he never stopped to reassure himself by remembering that, after all, rave as she might, she was his! He was incredibly soft with her--up to a certain point: "I will never let you go!" If his god spoke, the whisper was drowned in that gale of selfishness. Elizabeth, now, was the flint, striking that she might kindle in Blair some fire of anger which would burn up the whole edifice of her despair. But he opposed to her fiercest blows of terror and entreaty nothing but this softness of frightened love and unconscious power. He cowered at the thought of losing her; he entreated her pity, her mercy; he wept before her. The whole scene in that room in the inn, with the silent whirl of snow outside the windows, was one of dreadful abasement and brutality on both sides. "I am a bad woman. I will not stay with you. I will kill myself first. I am going away. I am going away to-night."