He smiled as he spoke, showing his white even teeth, and Alicia could not but admire his cool courage in the face of what must have been to him a catastrophe scarcely less than her own. They were sitting in the embrasure of a window, and their low voices were lost in the expanse of the great room. Nevertheless Colegrove did not consider it an ideal place to say what he had come to say. He said it, however, glancing through the wide-open doors to see that no person was in hearing. "March has accused himself of what no one believes, but has left you to bear the real burden. That is really what his alleged confession amounts to. I don’t think that you owe him anything. If he stays away, as you tell me he means to, you may claim your freedom at any time, and then perhaps you will consider me, who would never leave you as March has done. For my own part, I, of course, can get a divorce any day I choose." The same strange feeling of indignation came over Alicia which she felt when Colegrove had once before made implication against Roger March. Still she did not repulse him, who was the only human being that had voluntarily come to her that day, and she felt intuitively that he was the only one who would continue to come. "You must not speak of such things," she said coldly, and rising. Colegrove rose too. He had implanted the notion in her mind that March, after all, had sacrificed her, and that she was nothing to him. A new expression came into Alicia’s speaking eyes. She looked fixedly at Colegrove and then bent her head in reflection. "I go now," said Colegrove, "to fight my battle. I don’t know how, or when, or where it will end, but if they drag me down I will, like Samson, drag down all I can with me, and the crash will be heard from one end of this continent to the other. Here is an address that will always find me." He lifted her passive hand to his lips, put a card within it, and went away without another word. Alicia spent the intervening hours between then and a solitary dinner walking up and down the great drawing-rooms. She did not give Colegrove a thought; her mind, agonised and tormented, was working upon the problem whether or not March, in the intensity of his anger, had deliberately sacrificed her.