"But I haven't, my lady," he answered in a wondering voice. "To-morrow. . . ." She put her hand over his mouth with a little half-stifled groan. "Just take me in your arms and kiss me," she whispered.
And it seemed to Vane that his whole soul went out of him as he felt her lips on his.
Then she leaned back in her chair and looked at him gravely. "I wonder if you'll understand. I wonder still more if you'll forgive. Since you wouldn't settle things for me I had to settle them for myself. . . ."
Vane felt himself growing rigid.
"I settled them for myself," she continued steadily, "or rather they settled me for themselves. I tried to make you see I was afraid, you know . . . and you wouldn't."
"What are you driving at?" he said hoarsely.
"I am marrying Henry Baxter in church in about a week; I married him in a registry office the day he left for France."
EPILOGUE
A grey mist was blowing up the valley from Cromarty Firth. It hid the low hills that flanked the little branch railway line, slowly and imperceptibly drifting and eddying through the brown trees on their slopes. Down in London a world had gone mad—but the mist took no heed of such foolishness. Lines of men and women, linked arm-in-arm, were promenading Piccadilly to celebrate the End of the Madness; shrieking parties were driving to Wimbledon, or Limehouse, or up and down Bond Street in overweighted taxis, but the mist rolled on silently and inexorably. It took account of none of these things.
Since the beginning a mist such as this one had drifted up the valley from the open sea; until the end it would continue. . . . It was part of the Laws of Nature, and the man who watched it coming turned with a little shudder.