Hera kept moving toward the door, but always she felt his breath panting beside her. At the threshold she turned and paused long enough to say, her voice issuing without a tremor: “I repeat that what you have said is false, absolutely false!” Then she went her way down the corridor. * * * * * In solitude, she put herself face to face with the situation’s hideous fact. Though wounded to the depths of her being, she had no impulse to tears. She felt impelled rather to bitter smiles for her grim failure in striving to serve two masters--to travel any path but that which the heart pointed. So this was the price of her father’s peaceful days, her aunt’s triumph over the bloodhounds of debt, the restoration of a Barbiondi to the palace of her ancestors! Ah, well, she would end it now, and she cared not whether the sequel should be good or ill. The force of events had awakened in her a latent Titanic element that lifted her superior to weak scruple. She was conscious of a marvellous accession of moral strength. Now she felt that no barrier might rise high enough to baffle her purpose. Fervidly she was thankful that her spirit had come forth unconquered, and that, chained though she was to a rock, her soul could be free. She thought of her father, and weighed the effect upon his fortunes that parting from Tarsis might produce, but not for long did she harbour that consideration; she cast it from her as she might have dashed a cup of hemlock, resolved that her life should be poisoned no more for other people’s good. Come what might, in this crisis she would honour the heart’s edict. She had learned somewhat of her great mistake. It had proved a tree of knowledge, and in eating of the fruit her moral nature had found itself--become well defined and unified--so that she stood now as a law unto her own processes. Nevertheless, she retained her sense of justice, and drew comfort from the fact that her husband had been the aggressor; that the deceit by which he had obtained her consent to the marriage, his rash accusations, his insults, gave her warrant for quitting his house and ending the mockery of their relation. It never occurred to her mind that the situation left any alternative course. She rang for her maid and directed her to prepare for their departure on the morrow, by an early train. Then she wrote a message to Tarsis, enclosed the sheet in an envelope, and stood it against a mirror, to make sure that it should catch her eye in the morning. CHAPTER XV A BILL PAYABLE