Page:Terminations (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1895).djvu/233

Rh only the Dead who died possessed of me. They're mine in death because they were mine in life."

"He was yours in life, then, even if for a while he ceased to be. If you forgave him you went back to him. Those whom we've once loved"

"Are those who can hurt us most," Stransom broke in.

"Ah, it's not true—you've not forgiven him!" she wailed, with a passion that startled him.

He looked at her a moment. "What was it he did to you?"

"Every thing!" Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell. "Good-by."

He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read of the death of Acton Hague. "You mean that we meet no more?"

"Not as we have met—not there!"

He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement that rang out in the word she so passionately emphasized. "But what's changed—for you?"

She hesitated, in all the vividness of a trouble that, for the first time since he had known her, made her splendidly stern. "How can you understand now when you didn't understand before?"

"I didn't understand before only because I didn't know. Now that I know, I see what I've been living with for years," Stransom went on very gently.

She looked at him with a larger allowance, as if