“Ralph?”

She hesitated.  “No.  Laura.”

“What the devil is she cabling you about?”

“She says Ralph wants me.”

“Now—­at once?”

“At once.”

Van Degen laughed impatiently.  “Why don’t he tell you so himself?  What business is it of Laura Fairford’s?”

Undine’s gesture implied a “What indeed?”

“Is that all she says?”

She hesitated again.  “Yes—­that’s all.”  As she spoke she tossed the telegram into the basket beneath the writing-table.  “As if I didn’t have to go anyhow?” she exclaimed.

With an aching clearness of vision she saw what lay before her—­the hurried preparations, the long tedious voyage on a steamer chosen at haphazard, the arrival in the deadly July heat, and the relapse into all the insufferable daily fag of nursery and kitchen—­she saw it and her imagination recoiled.

Van Degen’s eyes still hung on her:  she guessed that he was intensely engaged in trying to follow what was passing through her mind.  Presently he came up to her again, no longer perilous and importunate, but awkwardly tender, ridiculously moved by her distress.

“Undine, listen:  won’t you let me make it all right for you to stay?”

Her heart began to beat more quickly, and she let him come close, meeting his eyes coldly but without anger.

“What do you call ‘making it all right’?  Paying my bills?  Don’t you see that’s what I hate, and will never let myself be dragged into again?” She laid her hand on his arm.  “The time has come when I must be sensible, Peter; that’s why we must say good-bye.”

“Do you mean to tell me you’re going back to Ralph?”

She paused a moment; then she murmured between her lips:  “I shall never go back to him.”

“Then you do mean to marry Chelles?”

“I’ve told you we must say good-bye.  I’ve got to look out for my future.”

He stood before her, irresolute, tormented, his lazy mind and impatient senses labouring with a problem beyond their power.  “Ain’t I here to look out for your future?” he said at last.

“No one shall look out for it in the way you mean.  I’d rather never see you again—­”

He gave her a baffled stare.  “Oh, damn it—­if that’s the way you feel!” He turned and flung away toward the door.

She stood motionless where he left her, every nerve strung to the highest pitch of watchfulness.  As she stood there, the scene about her stamped itself on her brain with the sharpest precision.  She was aware of the fading of the summer light outside, of the movements of her maid, who was laying out her dinner-dress in the room beyond, and of the fact that the tea-roses on her writing-table, shaken by Van Degen’s tread, were dropping their petals over Ralph’s letter, and down on the crumpled telegram which she could see through the trellised sides of the scrap-basket.