"I will give you two days to think it over," he said wearily, "and then--then I'll act on your decision!" And she knew that he was in earnest. CHAPTER XXIV ROSES AND THORNS Not for knaves like us she wept-- Yet who served or loved as we?-- Since her heart this many a day Went to one beyond the sea! But, if in those lands afar, She her lightest word should say, Here are ten good knights and true With ten lives to cast away! JOHN HARTLEY, "The Young Queen." We are--only what we have been!--"The Silver Poppy." Hartley lost no more time than was necessary before responding to Cordelia's message asking that he come to her at once. There was a touch of imperativeness in the hurriedly written little note that indefinitely appealed to him. It seemed to show him how much she had grown to lean on him. He assumed, though, that the urgency at the most implied nothing more than some impending problem in connection with her new book, and consequently Cordelia waited three anxious and impatient hours before he finally appeared before her. And greedily she was counting the minutes of that last precious day. The ordeal through which she had passed the afternoon before had left its traces behind it. It still showed on her face in an unusual look of pensive weariness about the heavy eyelids, and a deepened and almost feverish glow to the eyes themselves. For once, too, her face was the true color of old ivory, with one small touch of the tenderest, shell-like pink burning on each of her cheeks. The languor of her voice, the calm pathos of her glance, and the heavier shadow about her lashes, suggested to Hartley, as it had done before, but never so vividly, the quiet, half-sorrowful beauty of an autumn twilight. She was dressed in her riding-habit, of dark-green cloth, showing every line of the thin yet buoyant figure. It appeared to him as a figure with something bird-like in the very lightness and nervous quickness of movement beyond all its outward languor. The dark-green of her habit, too, seemed to give to the pale face above it a strangely heightened sense of isolation, like the gloom out of which the solitary figure of a Rembrandt portrait looks down on the world. "Cordelia, what is it?" he asked anxiously, startled at the change, though unable to determine in just what it consisted. She looked up quickly at the note of unusual tenderness in his voice. "I am going away!" she said quietly. A sudden sense of loss, of deprivation, swept over him, and both his voice and the startled face he turned to her showed his feeling. "Going away?" he echoed. "Yes." She shook her head sorrowfully. "But where, Cordelia?" "I leave for Quebec to-morrow morning, to join Mrs. Spaulding. From there I think I shall go back home--back to Kentucky!" "But why are you going?" "For your sake," she said, giving him her eyes unrestrainedly. "For my sake, Cordelia?" he repeated, astonished, openly miserable.