Page:Arthur Stringer - The Shadow.djvu/271

 you held me off. You put the other thing before my riendship!" "What do you know about friendship?" cried the gray-faced man.

"We were friends once," answered the woman, ignoring the bitter mockery in his cry.

He stared at her, untouched by the note of pathos in her voice. There was something abstracted about his stare, as though his mind had not yet adjusted itself to a vast new discovery. His inner vision seemed dazzled, just as the eye itself may be dazzled by unexpected light.

"So you sold me out!" he said for a third time. He did not move, but under that lava-like shell of diffidence were volcanic and coursing fires which even he himself could not understand.

"Jim, I would have done anything for you, once," went on the unhappy woman facing him. "You could have saved me—from him, from myself. But you let the chance slip away. I could n't go on. I saw where it would end. So I had to save myself. I had