"Don’t think I fail to see the other side," he said hastily. "Something of quiet and power has seemed to come out of it, but it was abandonment. It was weak. A better man would not have thought of letting go as I did. Even if he didn’t want to live he would have put himself out of the way in a clean-cut abrupt fashion—" She shook her head quickly, as if pained at some picture in her mind. "A real man would have done neither," he added. "He would have taken his medicine and not thought of death. There is always a yellow streak in letting go.... I’m sorry to bring you such a story. It has no virtue save that of being true. Also it is back—finished." Her silence was destroying him. The panorama of his abandonment rushed past in a kind of red dark. His voice had a whimper, for his own ears, as he said: "At least, it was all in the year. I drank little before, I drink nothing now." The absurdity of it now prevailed. His story had taken her away from him. Much thinking had made him lose the ugliness. He had told her matters which were so horrible as to break the spell between them. She seemed to be slipping away, and just now he thought of the man in the Forward Room in relation to that year in the Drift. She was not the first woman who had reached the end of endurance in this business. The laugh formed deep within him—the laugh of a man at the last ditch again. What a fool he had been to tell her what had happened—to forget the part that this particular devil had played in her life! ... He would go on to Wampli now—without a woman waiting. The laugh was twisting in his lips, and he had the sense that if it came it would slay the last hope. Anna Erivan turned and started at the sight of his face. "I wasn’t thinking of the months in which you held yourself palms-up to death, and drifted along the water-fronts," she said quickly. "Oh, any one could see that has nothing to do with you now." Romney gasped, and, leaning forward, placed his wide-stretched hand near hers, which went to it. "I was thinking of the woman," she said slowly. "I never thought I would feel like this."