For a moment she felt that the strain was intolerable, and a fear entered her mind lest she should faint or weep and so make things harder than they should be able to bear. "You mean that something must happen--that there will be a break between us?" she said. Leaving the table, he walked to the window and back before he answered her. "I can't go on this way. I'm not that sort. A generation ago, I suppose, we should have done it--but we've lost grip, we've lost endurance." Then he cried out suddenly, as if he were justifying himself: "It is hell. I've been in hell for a year--don't you see it?" After his violence, her voice sounded almost lifeless, so quiet, so utterly free from passion, was its quality. "As long as that--for a year?" she asked. "Oh, longer, but it has got worse. It has got unendurable. I've fought--God knows I've fought--but I can't stand it. I've got to do something. I've got to find a way. You must have seen it coming, Virginia. You must have seen that this thing is stronger than I am." "Do--do you want her so much?" and she, who had learned from life not to want, looked at him with the pity which he might have seen in her eyes had he stabbed her. "So much that I'm going mad. There's no other end to it. It's been coming on for two years--all the time I've been away from Dinwiddie I've been fighting it." She did not answer, and when, after the silence had grown oppressive, he turned back from the window through which he had been gazing, he could not be sure that she had heard him. So still she seemed that she was like a woman of marble. "You're too good for me, that's the trouble. You've been too good for me from the beginning," he said. Unfastening her coat, which she had kept on, she laid it on the sofa at her back, and then put up her hands to take out her hatpins. "I must pack my things," she said suddenly. "Will you engage my berth back to Dinwiddie for to-night?" He nodded without speaking, and she added hastily, "I shan't go down again before starting. But there is no need that you should go to the train with me." At this he turned back from the door where he had waited with his hand on the knob. "Won't you let me do even that?" he asked, and his voice sounded so like Harry's that a sob broke from her lips. The point was so small a one--all points seemed to her so small--that her will died down and she yielded without protest. What did it matter--what did anything matter to her now? "I'll send up your luncheon," he added almost gratefully. "You will be ill if you don't eat something." "No, please don't. I am not hungry," she answered, and then he went out softly, as though he were leaving a sick-room, and left her alone with her anguish--and her packing.