"You're a half-breed, and everything you do, everything you don't do, shows it. My God, what I've had to endure as the wife of a half-caste who had to leave the Army. You, too. It hasn't been easy for you. You've suffered. This is our chance: our chance to escape from each other. You want your freedom. You want it—you want it—you want it. I've seen it in your face. That's why you've come back. You don't want to go through life chained to a woman who hates you, because if you drive me to desperation I'll make you wish you'd never been born. You'll buy your freedom."
It was to be war. He rose, white with passion. She moved away as if it were settled, as if the victory were already hers, repeating hysterically:
"You'll buy it. You'll buy it."
It was a mistake. It made him inflexible.
"But not at that price," he said fiercely. "You will tell Lord Yester or I must."
The noise of the colloquy had penetrated to the drawing-room.
Lord Yester, unseen to either of them, had quietly entered the library.
"Will you or shall I?" was Hal's relentless demand.
She turned and saw him—Lord Yester. The fierce mounting flames of her fury died down into ashes. She seemed to shrink and draw within herself, grow smaller and whiter. Hal followed her intense fixed look to its object. Yester, too, looked older and smaller and paler. It seemed a long time ago when they were agreed and each saw Happiness standing by an open door. Now the door was shut and hung with crape. Lord Yester knew that he had entered a death chamber. He gazed at her in silence. He saw the proud queenly woman cowed, looking haggard and wan with fear and despair. Love and tenderness shone from his eyes and begged her to tell him all, to trust to him—that years of devotion would make amends for all her suffering. He saw that it was not in her thought that he could help her. She looked to the other—to the man she had turned to stone. Her eyes swept him with a plea for mercy. She crept to him, kneeled to him, took his hand, abased herself, drew herself up to a level with his face, searched it for one ray of hope, one sign of relenting pity, then, with a low heart-rending moan such as neither man would ever forget, she crept like a piteous wounded thing out of the room.
Lord Yester did not attempt to help her or to follow her. He knew in some instinctive way that she was past help. He looked at Hal. He saw him stricken, spent, seared by suffering. It wasn't the same man he had talked to a few moments ago. Then he had been a splendid animal, lithe, vibrant, instinct with life and the joy of living. Here was a sad, disillusioned, heart-broken, middle-aged man without hope in the world. It had been a drawn battle—a duel in which both combatants had been wounded unto death.