"I shall telephone home," she replied. "If that woman is still in the house, I shall go down into the country, and from there I shall write my lawyers and apply for a separation." "So those are your plans," he remarked calmly. "Yes. Can you suggest anything better?" "I can suggest something a thousand times better." She hesitated for a moment. Perhaps she was conscious of a certain alteration in his deportment, the ring of his last words, the slight but unusual air of emotional fervour with which he seemed somehow to have become endowed. A woman of curiously strong virginal instincts, she realised, perhaps for the first time, the approach of a great change in Wingate's attitude towards her. Yet she could not keep from her lips the words which must bring his avowal. "What do you mean?" she faltered. "That you end it all," he advised firmly, "that you take your courage in both hands, that you do not return to your husband at all." "Not return," she repeated, her eyes held by his. "That you come to me," he went on, bending over the side of her chair. "Needless, wonderful words, but I love you. You were the first woman in my life. You will be the last. I have been silent, as you know. I have waited for something like this, and I think the time has come." "The time can never come," she cried despairingly. "The time has come at least for me to tell you that I love you more than any woman on earth," he declared, "that I want to take care of you, to take you into my life, to build a wall of passionate devotion around you, to keep you free from every trouble and every harm." "Ah, dear friend, if it were but possible!" she murmured, holding his hands tightly. "But it is possible," he insisted. "All that we need is courage. You owe nothing to your husband. You can leave him without remorse or a moment's shame. Your life just now is wasted,--a precious human life. I want you, Josephine. God knows how I want you!" "You have my friendship--even my love. There, I have said it!" she repeated, with a little sob, "my love." His arms were suddenly around her. She shrank back in her chair. Her terrified eyes invited and yet reproached him. "Remember--oh, please remember!" she cried. "What can I remember except one thing?" he whispered. She held him away from her. "You talk as though everything were possible between us. How can that be? I have no joy in my husband, nor he in me--but I am married. We are not in America." He rose to his feet, a strong man trembling in every limb. He stood before her, trying to talk reasonably, trying to plead his cause behind the shelter of reasonable words.