Page:A fool in spots (IA foolinspots00riveiala).pdf/64

 "You cannot go out of it," she answered, "but good bye."

"Good bye," he repeated, which should only mean, "God bless you."

There was a flutter of pulses, and Robert walked away with head upheld, dry-eyed, to face the world. Unfaltering, she let him go, the while she had more than a suspicion of the lips whose false speaking had wrought her such woe.

When he reached his room he unlocked the drawer, produced from it a card, and looked long and tenderly upon the face he saw. He bent over and kissed the unresponsive lips. This was his requiem in memory of a worthier life. Then lighting a match he set it afire, and watched it burn to a shadowy cinder, which mounted feebly in the air for a moment, making a gray background against whose dullness stood out, in its round finished beauty, the life he had lost—echoing with a true woman's beautiful soul.

As the ashes whitened at his feet, he thought, "Thus the old life is effaced, I will go into the new."

The midnight train took him out of town, and Cherokee was weeping over a basket of white roses which had come just at evening.