He looked at her as never yet. “What was it he did to you?”
“Everything!” Then abruptly she put out her hand in farewell. “Good-bye.”
He turned as cold as he had turned that night he read the man’s death. “You mean that we meet no more?”
He stood aghast at this snap of their great bond, at the renouncement that rang out in the word she so expressively sounded. “But what’s changed—for you?”
She waited in all the sharpness of a trouble that for the first time since he had known her made her splendidly stern. “How can you understand now when you didn’t understand before?”
“I didn’t understand before only because I didn’t know. Now that I know, I see what I’ve been living with for years,” Stransom went on very gently.
She looked at him with a larger allowance, doing this gentleness justice. “How can I then, on this new knowledge of my own, ask you to continue to live with it?”
“I set up my altar, with its multiplied meanings,” Stransom began; but she quietly interrupted him.
“You set up your altar, and when I wanted one most I found it magnificently ready. I used it with the gratitude I’ve always shown you, for I knew it from of old to be dedicated to Death. I told you long ago that my Dead weren’t many. Yours were, but all you had done for them was none too much for _my_ worship! You had placed a great light for Each—I gathered them together for One!”
“We had simply different intentions,” he returned. “That, as you say, I perfectly knew, and I don’t see why your intention shouldn’t still sustain you.”
“That’s because you’re generous—you can imagine and think. But the spell is broken.”
It seemed to poor Stransom, in spite of his resistance, that it really was, and the prospect stretched grey and void before him. All he could say, however, was: “I hope you’ll try before you give up.”
“If I had known you had ever known him I should have taken for granted he had his candle,” she presently answered. “What’s changed, as you say, is that on making the discovery I find he never has had it. That makes _my_ attitude”—she paused as thinking how to express it, then said simply—“all wrong.”
“Will you give him his candle?” she asked.
He waited, but only because it would sound ungracious; not because of a doubt of his feeling. “I can’t do that!” he declared at last.