She stood silent, more beautiful than he had ever seen her. She wore a plain gown of dark blue silk from which Eleanore had removed all trimming so that in case of mishap it would not be recognized. Her skin against the unrelieved blue took on the thick white luster of a dogwood petal, except on her cheekbones where excitement had tinted it pink. Her bronze hair disordered by the hood lay loose about her neck and at the temples small tendrils, curled tight by the dampness, gave her face a luminous delicacy.

The force of her beauty unnerved him. A honeyed lassitude swept over him and into his brain. His hands shook suddenly. He scowled, and, turning sharply, lit the candle on the table, consciously prolonging the small business with the flint and steel and tinder.

He came back to her and drew her gently to the bed. She shrank, with a slight embarrassed sound.

'There's nowhere else to sit, my darling,' said Merne, with grim humor.

She looked about the dingy room. The wavering candle-flame flickered to the rafters from which hung cobwebs and dust in long furry shreds. Cockroaches skittered across the floor. The couple next door who had been murmuring burst into raucous song. This was followed by the clink of bottles.

Theo sank on the lumpy bed beside him. Her eyes filled with tears. 'I wanted it to be so beautiful, Merne: our last hours together. A memory to live by, to hold it close in my heart forever. It should have been as it was before: the sun, the trees, the river that we love. I never felt shame there. But here——'

Her head drooped against him. He pressed his lips silently to her hair.

'Don't go West,' she whispered. 'I can't let you go. Stay near me, my beloved, even if we cannot see each other. You'll be safe. And sometimes we could meet.'

He raised her face so that she must see his eyes. 'Sometimes we could meet,' he repeated bitterly. 'How, Theodosia? In places like this?'

She flung away, burying her face in the corn-husk mattress. Her arms curled around her head in a gesture at once so childish and so full of despair that it turned him to water.

'I thought you loved me,' she cried, with the complete unreason of women.

He leaned over her. 'I do. There will never be anyone else. Don't you know that?'

She turned her body slowly so that she could look up at him. Her warm breath scarcely passed her parted lips. Her face was stilled by a sorrowful tenderness. 'Yes, I do know that,' she whispered. She raised her arms. He kissed her then as he had never kissed her, even on that first day by the river, with the brutality of desire long held in check. Suddenly she stiffened; he saw beneath the answering passion in her eyes an agonizing fear.