Canning stood panting, shaken and speechless.  Upon him was the last measure of defeat.  He had staked his passion and his pride in the supreme attack, and had been crushingly repulsed.  Doubt not that he read the incredible portents in the heavens now.  His face went from chalk to leaden gray.

He drew his tongue once across his lips, and said, just articulately: 

“If I go—­out of this room—­alone ... as God lives, you’ll never see me again.”

It must have been something in Hugo’s difficult voice, surely nothing in the words, that set a chord to stirring in Cally.  She took her eyes from her hands, glanced once at his subtly distorted face.  And then she stood silent by the barrier table, looking down, knotting and unknotting her yellow sash-ends....

That other night of humiliation in the library, which she had never been able to forget, had risen swiftly on the wings of memory.  But, curiously, she felt no such uprush of shame now; her fury mysteriously ebbed from her.  Even in this moment, still trembling from his familiar handling, still with the frightening sense of her life going to ruin about her, she felt a rising pity for her prince of lovers whom time and circumstance had brought to this....

“Perhaps,” said she, out of the silence, in almost a natural tone, “I ought to feel very—­angry and—­and indignant....  But I don’t.  I only feel sad....  Hugo, why need there be any bitterness between us?  We’ve both made a mistake, that’s all, and I feel it’s been my fault from the beginning.  If you seem to take me—­rather—­lightly....  I must have taught you to think of me that way....  And you’ll soon see how—­how superficial my attraction for you was, soon forget....”

Strangely, these mild words seemed to affect Hugo more than anything done or said before.  In fact, he appeared unable to bear them.  He had checked her speech suddenly by lifting his hand, in a vague way, to his head; and now, without a word, he turned away, walking blindly toward the door.

She, in silence, followed his going with dark eyes that looked half ready to weep.

By the door into the hall, through which she had come a little while before, the broken young man paused.  His face was stony gray, touched with livid streaks.  Standing, he looked unseeingly about the room, around and over her; then at last at her.  It had seemed to be his intention to say something, to claim the woman’s privilege of the last word.  But now, when the moment arrived, there came no words.

For once Hugo must be indifferent to anti-climax, must fail to leave a lady’s presence with an air.  Standing and looking, he suddenly flung out one arm in a wild, curious gesture; and on that he opened the door, very quickly.

The door shut again, quietly enough.  And that was all.  The beginning at the Beach had touched an end indeed.  Hugo was gone.  His feet would thunder this way no more.