When, toward three o'clock, he reached his house, he was surprised to see that a light burned in Roger's office. The office door was unlocked, and he entered. Beside her desk stood Kate, suddenly risen, and on the desk's arm lay a few note-books, a dictionary and a pair of sateen sleeve-protectors. "I've come for my things--I've got a new job," she said after a moment, in a dry unnatural voice. David saw instantly through her pitiful craft--knew instantly how long she had been waiting there. He filled tinglingly with a quick rush of pity and pain and tenderness. He wanted to thank her, but he felt the emptiness of words, and dared not. So, confusedly, awkwardly, he stood looking at the white face. Her eyes holding to his like a magnetic needle, she moved across the room, paused a pace away, and stared, hardly breathing, up at him. Her burning, questioning eyes, ringed with their purple misery, forced from him a low cry of pain. "Oh, Kate!--Kate!" She trembled slightly at his voice. "You've seen her!" she whispered. "Yes." He felt tears scalding his eyes. Suddenly he caught her hands and broken words leaped from his lips. "What a wonderful soul you are!--I can't speak my thanks, but in my heart--" She jerked her hands away and drew back. "Don't!" she gasped. "Don't!" He hated himself for the suffering he was causing her--for his helplessness to thank her, to say the thing in his heart. She continued to stare up at him with the same quivering tensity. After a moment she asked in a dry whisper: "And she loves you?" "Yes." A sharp moan escaped her. She put an unsteady hand out and caught her desk, and the edge of David's vision saw how the fingers clenched the wood. "I knew it--from the way she acted," she said mechanically. For several moments more she looked up at him, her face as pale as death. Then she turned and, thoughtless of her belongings, walked toward the door, a thin, unsteady figure. As she reached for the knob he sprang across the room with a cry and caught her outstretched hand. "Oh, Kate--forgive me!--I hate myself!--Forgive me!" Her hand tightened spasmodically on his, her body swayed, her eyes flamed up into his. "Oh, David!" burst from her in a low moan of infinite pain and loss. For a moment she was all a-tremble. Then she clenched herself in an effort at self-control, answered him with a slow nod, and dropping her head turned and went through the door. CHAPTER VIII A PARTIAL RELEASE When David, after leaving Helen at the end of the next afternoon, sat down to his early dinner in the almost empty Pan-American, the Mayor came swaying toward him. During the last two weeks the Mayor had been daily seeking David for sympathy over his marriage, or advice upon his wedding clothes and upon arrangements for the ceremony that was to make his life a joyless waste. He took an opposite chair, sighed heavily and regarded David in steady gloom.