"Then you will kill me. Elizabeth! Think how I love you; think! And--_he_ wouldn't want you, since you threw him over. You couldn't go back to him." "Go back to David? now? How can you say such a thing! I am dead, so far as he is concerned. Oh--oh--oh,--why am I not dead? Why do I go on living? I will kill myself rather than stay with you!" It seemed to Elizabeth that she had forgotten David; she had forgotten that she had meant to write him a terrible letter. She had forgotten everything but the blasting realization of what had happened to her. "Do not dare to speak his name!" she said, frantically. "I cannot bear it! I cannot bear it! I am dead to him. He despises me, as I despise myself. Blair, I can't--I can't live; I can't go on--" In the end he conquered. There were two days and nights of struggle; and then she yielded. Blair's reiterated appeal was to her sense of justice. Curiously, but most characteristically, through all the clamor of her despair at this incredible thing that she had done, justice was the one word which penetrated to her consciousness. Was it fair, she debated, numbly, in one of their long, aching silences, was it just, that because she had ruined herself, she should ruin him? She had locked herself in her room, and was sitting with her head on her arms that were stretched before her on a little table. Blair had gone out for one of his long, wretched walks through the snow; sometimes he took the landlord's dog along for company, and on this particular morning, a morning of brilliant sunshine and cold, insolent wind, he had stopped to buy a bag of nuts for the hungry squirrels in the woods. As he walked he was planning, planning, planning, how he could make his misery touch Elizabeth's heart; he was all unconscious that her misery had not yet touched his heart. But Elizabeth, locked in her room, was beginning to think of his misery. Dully at first, then with dreary concentration, she went over in her mind his arguments and pleadings: he was satisfied to love her even if she didn't love him; he had known what stakes he played for, and he was willing to abide by them; she ought to do the same; she had done this thing--she had married him, was it fair, now, to destroy him, soul and body, just because she had acted on a moment's impulse? In a crisis of terror, his primitive instinct of self-preservation had swept away the acquired instinct of chivalry, and like a brutal boy, he had reminded her that she was to blame as well as he. "You did it, too," he told her. sullenly. She remembered that he had said he had not fully understood that it was only impulse on her part; "I thought you cared for me a little, or else you wouldn't have married me." In the panic of the moment he really had not known that he lied, and in her absorption in her own misery she did not contradict him. She ought, he said, to make the best of the situation; or else he would kill himself. "Do you want me to kill myself?" he had threatened.