It was girlish; it was childish; it was scarcely according to the canons for conducting a final rupture; but it was not the less tragically serious. Indeed, the spectacle of this young girl absurdly behaving like one, in a serious crisis, increased the tragicalness of the situation even if it did not heighten it. The idea that ran through Gerald's brain was the ridiculous folly of having anything to do with young girls. He was quite blind to her beauty. "'Go'?" he repeated her word. "You mean that?" "Of course I mean it," she answered promptly. The coward in him urged him to take advantage of her ignorant, helpless pride, and leave her at her word. He remembered the scene she had made at the pit shaft, and he said to himself that her charm was not worth her temper, and that he was a fool ever to have dreamed that it was, and that he would be doubly a fool now not to seize the opportunity of withdrawing from an insane enterprise. "I am to go?" he asked, with a sneer. She nodded. "Of course if you order me to leave you, I must. Can I do anything for you?" She signified that he could not, "Nothing? You're sure?" She frowned. "Well, then, good-bye." He turned towards the door. "I suppose you'd leave me here without money or anything?" she said in a cold, cutting voice. And her sneer was far more destructive than his. It destroyed in him the last trace of compassion for her. "Oh, I beg pardon!" he said, and swaggeringly counted out five sovereigns on to a chest of drawers. She rushed at them. "Do you think I'll take your odious money?" she snarled, gathering the coins in her gloved hand. Her first impulse was to throw them in his face; but she paused and then flung them into a corner of the room. "Pick them up!" she commanded him. "No, thanks," he said briefly; and left, shutting the door. Only a very little while, and they had been lovers, exuding tenderness with every gesture, like a perfume! Only a very little while, and she had been deciding to telegraph condescendingly to her mother that she was 'all right'! And now the dream was utterly dissolved. And the voice of that hard commonsense which spake to her in her wildest moods grew loud in asserting that the enterprise could never have come to any good, that it was from its inception an impossible enterprise, unredeemed by the slightest justification. An enormous folly! Yes, an elopement; but not like a real elopement; always unreal! She had always known that it was only an imitation of an elopement, and must end in some awful disappointment. She had never truly wanted to run away; but something within her had pricked her forward in spite of her protests. The strict notions of her elderly relatives were right after all. It was she who had been wrong. And it was she who would have to pay. "I've been a wicked girl," she said to herself grimly, in the midst of her ruin.