She started to speak, but he raised his hand deprecatingly. "Leave me no bitterer words to remember," he begged. "I shall say good-by!" He spoke with steady dignity.
She held out one hand unsteadily. He took both, and, looking down, they saw the sparkle of his ring on her finger. Without a word she slipped it off and gave it to him. He thrust it into his pocket.
"The others," she whispered.
He snapped the lid and thrust the case after the ring.
"Good-by!" he said once more. "I shall not say I will not see you again. I am not given to heroics. I," he spoke bitterly, "am commonplace, quite. It is likely I shall stay here as if nothing had happened, but this is good-by!" He raised her hand, kissed it where his ring had been, and was gone.
XVIII
It was five years since he had had any word from her, that woman who bore his name out there in the West, and whom he remembered with fierce shame, or put away from his thoughts with cold bitterness.
He sat all night in the chair in which he flung himself when he came back from the professor's house to his room. The fire died in his grate, he did not heed it; he was cold as ice, he did not know it. The stars paled and faded as he sat there. He was making no plan of life, raking no old memories; he was stunned, dazed.