Harry had no answer for her outburst. In his heart he knew that what she had said was true. He sat in silence, his eyes upon the fire and her hand in his; and a moment or two later she dropped upon her knees at his side. "But oh, Harry, come back to me!" she cried. "You must go I know. That's the way things happen. But oh, come back to me." CHAPTER XXXVII THE LAST At nine o'clock on a morning of July during the next year an auxiliary barquentine of four hundred and fifty tons steamed westward with the tide past the Isle of Wight. Besides the helmsman, Cynthia and Harry Rames were upon the bridge. They stood side by side, Cynthia gripping the rail in front of her with both of her hands. They did not speak. The ship glided past Cowes gay with its white yachts and crowded esplanade and rounded Gurnard Point into Newtown Bay. Cynthia looked ahead through a blur of tears, watching for and yet dreading to see a low square church tower stand out against the sky close to the water in a dip of the coast-line hills. Opposite to that church the ship was stopped and a boat was lowered. Cynthia, with Robert Brook to look after her, was put ashore on Yarmouth pier; and the barquentine dipped her flag and steamed on to the Needles and the open sea on its three years' voyage. Robert Brook escorted Cynthia across the water to Southampton, and the next day witnessed her departure from the docks on a steamer of the Royal Mail for Buenos Ayres. He returned to London that afternoon, took a solitary dinner at his club, and walked afterward to Curzon Street. The Rames's house was all lit up, and from the open windows music drifted out upon the summer night. Harry and Cynthia had let their house a week before, and to-night the new residents were giving a party. Robert Brook had an invitation and went in. He listened for half an hour to a party of coons and then could endure no more. The comic songs and the laughter seemed to him that night in this house a desecration. For in the characters of Harry Rames and his wife he chose to see something of greatness, in their lives something of achievement. He looked about the walls. Some dark and terrible hours must needs have been passed by both Harry and Cynthia within them before the great resolution had been taken which had condemned her to three years of loneliness on an estancia in South America and had stripped him of a sure career in politics.