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 do it, Mary. I'll go away. . . . You can spend the night here and leave in the morning. No one in the Town will know you haven't spent the night at Shane's Castle."

"Where will you go?"

"I'll go to the tents. I'll be all right."

She suddenly put her hand over her eyes, and, in a low voice, asked, "And . . . what's to come after, Philip?"

"I don't know . . . I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing."

"We can't go on . . . I can't . . ."

"No . . . I'd rather be dead."

Suddenly, with a sob, she fell forward on the table, burying her face in her hands. "You belong to your mother still, Philip . . . you can't shake off the hard, wicked things she's taught you. Oh, God! If she'd only died . . . we'd have been married to each other!"

She began to cry softly, and, at the sound, he stopped the mechanical business of buttoning his coat, and then, almost as if he were speaking to himself, he said, "Damn them all! We've a right to our happiness. They can't take it from us. They can't . . ."

He raised her face from the table and kissed it again and again with a kind of wild, rude passion that astonished her, until she lost herself completely in its power. Suddenly he ceased, and, looking at her, said, "It doesn't matter if to-morrow never comes. I love you, Mary . . . I love you. That's all that matters."

They were happy then, for in love and in death all things are wiped out. There, in the midst of the dead and frozen park, she set him free for a little time.