David gave her a deadly look. "You will kill me, Elizabeth, unless you come to me," he said, roughly. "Do you want to rob me again?--You've done it once," he reminded her; love made him brutal. There was a moment of silence. The eyes of the mother and son crossed like swords. Elizabeth, standing between them, shivered; then slowly she turned to David, and held out her hands, her open palms falling at her sides with a gesture of complete and pitiful surrender. "Very well, David. I won't do it again. I won't hurt you again. I will do whatever you tell me." David caught her in his arms. His mother trembled with despair; the absolute immovability of these two was awful! "Elizabeth, he is selfish and wicked! David, have you no manhood? Shame on you!" Contempt seemed her last resource; it did not touch him. "Wait two days," she implored him; "one day, even--" "I told you we are going to-morrow," he said. He was urging Elizabeth gently from the room, but at his mother's voice she paused. "Suppose," Helena Richie was saying--"suppose that Blair does not give you a divorce?" Elizabeth looked into David's eyes silently. "And," his mother said, "when David gets tired of you--what then?" "Mother!" "Men do tire of such women, Elizabeth. What then?" "I am not afraid of that," the girl said. The room was very still. The two looking into each other's eyes needed no words; the battling mother had apparently reached the end of effort. Yet it was not the end. As she stood there a slow illumination grew in her face--the knowledge, tragic and triumphant, that if Love would save others, itself it cannot save! . . . "I'm not afraid that he will tire of me," Elizabeth had said; and David's mother, looking at him with ineffable compassion, said, very gently: "I was not afraid of that, once, myself." That was all. She was standing up, clinging to the table; her face gray, her chin shaking. They neither of them grasped the sense of her words; then suddenly David caught his breath: "What did you say?" "I said--" She stopped. "Oh, my poor David, I wouldn't tell you if I could help it; if only there was any other way! But there isn't. I have tried, oh, I have tried every other way." She put her hands over her face for an instant, then looked at him. "David, I said that _I_ was not afraid, once, myself, that _my_ lover would tire of me." There was absolute silence in the room. "But he did, Elizabeth. He did. He did." Then David said, "I don't understand." "Yes, you do; you understand that a man once talked to me just as you are talking to Elizabeth; he said he would marry me when I got my divorce. I think he meant it--just as you mean it, now. At any rate, I believed him. Just as Elizabeth believes you." David Richie stepped back violently; his whole face shuddered. "You?" he said, "my mother? No!--no!--no!" And his mother, gathering up her strength, cringing like some faithful dog struck across the face, pointed at him with one shaking hand.