“Robert, I suppose you have not spoken without consideration, and if you think I would be a burden to you, it is best to go on without me.” She ended with a deep-drawn breath.
“That sound was not a sob,” she said bravely, “I only lost my breath and caught it hard again.”
“Yes, Cherokee, I am going without you, going out of your life. Good bye.”
“You cannot go out of it,” she answered, “but good bye.”
“Good bye,” he repeated, which should only mean, “God bless you.”
There was a flutter of pulses, and Robert walked away with head upheld, dry-eyed, to face the world. Unfaltering, she let him go, the while she had more than a suspicion of the lips whose false speaking had wrought her such woe.
When he reached his room he unlocked the drawer, produced from it a card, and looked long and tenderly upon the face he saw. He bent over and kissed the unresponsive lips. This was his requiem in memory of a worthier life. Then lighting a match he set it afire, and watched it burn to a shadowy cinder, which mounted feebly in the air for a moment, making a gray background against whose dullness stood out, in its round finished beauty, the life he had lost—echoing with a true woman’s beautiful soul.
As the ashes whitened at his feet, he thought, “Thus the old life is effaced, I will go into the new.”
The midnight train took him out of town, and Cherokee was weeping over a basket of white roses which had come just at evening.