"'Betty!' he cried. 'Are you ill?'"
As he spoke her name the eyes rounded with amazement, then slowly narrowed to an expression that sent a chill through Bob's heart. It was no more like Betty, that look, than the voice that accompanied it.
"So you knew all the time who I was, and yet you spoke to me like that—pretending you didn't know."
Bob tried to speak, but she went on in a low, monotonous, terrible voice, only just raised above a whisper.
"You are a coward, and what you have been saying is a lie—a mean, contemptible, cowardly lie. Now I'm going. I sha'n't see you again."
Her lips were beginning to quiver. She could not trust herself to say another word.
Bob, utterly crushed, bewildered and silenced, walked beside her for appearance's sake to the door of the lift. Without a word, without a look, she stepped inside and the bronze door clanged between them.
Alone in the writing-room, Bob tore up sheet after sheet of the hotel paper in fevered attempts to compose a note to Betty. As he crumpled them up one after another, he stuffed them into his pocket, not stopping to tear them up. The moments were slipping by. At last in desperation, he wrote:
"Betty—For God's sake see me, if only for a moment before I go. My train leaves in half an hour. Bob."
He rang for a waiter and without stopping to reread it, slipped the note into an envelope, directed and sealed it up, and gave it to the man to take to Miss Thompson's room.