The Outcry

IX-3

He had stopped her thus, but she had also stopped him, and her passionate denial set him a limit. "I've got to say—sorry as I am—that if you must have an answer it's this: that never, Lord John, never, can there be anything more between us." And her gesture cleared her path, permitting her to achieve her flight. "Never, no, never," she repeated as she went—"never, never, never!" She got off by the door at which she had been aiming to some retreat of her own, while aghast and defeated, left to make the best of it, he sank after a moment into a chair and remained quite pitiably staring before him, appealing to the great blank splendour.

BOOK SECOND ILADY SANDGATE, on a morning late in May, entered her drawing-room by the door that opened at the right of that charming retreat as a person com