He has risen to his feet. They stand staring each at each in the twilight room, the one not whiter than the other. How much worse it is than he had feared! Close outside the window a robin is piping blithely. A stupid wonder flashes across his mind as to whether he is one of those for whom Peggy scatters crumbs on her window-sill.
'I think that that is a question not worth answering,' he replies, trying to speak calmly.
'But all the same it must be answered,' rejoins she, with symptoms of rising excitement. 'You shall not leave the room until it is answered.'
'Will you please to repeat it then in a more intelligible form?' asks he, with a forced composure.
For a moment she glares at him with dead-white face and shining eyes; then, rising from her sofa, flings herself into his arms.
'How can you expect me to say such words twice?' cries she, bursting into a tempest of tears; 'but if it is so, tell me the truth. You have always blamed me for not speaking truth; learn your own lesson: tell me the truth. Is it all over—all at an end?'
She has withdrawn herself again from him, and now stands holding him at arm's length, a hand upon each shoulder, her dimmed eyes fixed upon his face, searching for the least sign of faltering or evasion upon it. But she finds none.
'You know,' he answers, in a low quiet voice, whose gentleness is the cover for a bottomless depression, 'that there will never be an end to it until you make one.'
Something in his tone dries her tears.
'Then why do you want to stay here?' asks she, her voice still shaking from her late gust of passion.