"Elizabeth, did you see how he looked at me? _Some day your son will look that way at you._" CHAPTER XL No one spoke. The murmuring crash along the sands was suddenly loud in their ears, but the room was still. It was the stillness of finality; David had lost Elizabeth. He knew it; but he could not have said why he knew it. Perhaps none of the great decisions of passion can at the moment say "why." Under the lash of some invisible whip, the mind leaps this way or that without waiting for the approval of Reason. Certainly David did not wait for it to know that all was over between him and Elizabeth. He did not reason--he only cringed back, his eyes hidden in his bent arm, and gasped out those words which, scourging his mother, arraigned himself. Nor was there any reason in Elizabeth's cry of "Oh, Mrs. Richie, I love you"; or in her run across the room to drop upon the floor beside David's mother, clasping her and pressing her face against the older woman's shaking knees. "I _do_ love you--" Only in Helena Richie's mind could there have been any sort of logic. "This," her ravaged and exalted face seemed to say, "this was why he was given to me." Once he had told her that her goodness had saved him; that night her goodness had not availed. And God had used her sin! Aloud, all that she said was: "David, don't feel so badly. It isn't as if I were your own mother, you know; you needn't be so un-happy, David." Her eyes yearned over him. "You won't do it?" she said, in a breathless whisper. To himself he was saying: "It makes no difference! What difference can it possibly make? Not a particle; not a particle." Yet some deeper self must have known that the difference was made, for at that whispered question he seemed to shake his head. But Elizabeth, weeping, said: "No; we won't--we won't! Dear Mrs. Richie, I love you. David! Speak to her." He got up with a stupid look, then his eye fell on his mother's face. "You are worn out," he said in a dazed way, "You'll come up-stairs now? Elizabeth, make her go up-stairs." She was worn out; she nodded, with a sort of meek obedience, and put out her hand to Elizabeth. David opened the door for them and followed them up-stairs. Would his mother have this or that? Could he do anything? Nothing, nothing. No, Elizabeth must not stay with her, please; she would rather be alone. As he turned away she called to him, "Elizabeth and I will take the noon train, David." And he said, "Yes, I will have a carriage here."