The biting tragedy of their story—fooled and betrayed as they had been on every side—made her marriage appear to her each successive moment more and more in the light of a mocking farce.
'Why, Stella—this is a wedding-ring!'
He looked at her, but she neither spoke nor met his
'Whose wedding-ring is it?'
He waited for her answer in sickening suspense. To their dying hour they must both remember the awful stillness—broken only by the sullen ticking of a clock, and then the strains of a military band that suddenly broke out into 'Die Wacht am Rhein.'
'For God's sake, Stella, tell me how this ring came to be in your glove? Whose is it?'
The agony in his voice made the words beat upon her heart with unendurable pain.
'It is mine,' came the answer at last, with a low, wailing sound.
When he heard that, he stood looking at her, his lips parted in breathless, incredulous horror.
Again there was a deep silence. This time it was broken by the miserable sobbing of a woman whose head was bent in bitter shame.