He turned stupidly and opened the door, making his way out into the night.
But she did not see him, for her burning face was hidden in her hands.
Drunk as though drugged, the echoes of passion still stirred his darker self, and his whirling thoughts pierced his heart like names, whispering, urging him to go back and complete the destruction he had begun--take her once more into his arms and keep her there through life, through death, till the bones of the blessed and the damned alike stirred in their graves at the last reveille.
To know that she, too, had been fighting herself--that she, too, feared passion, stirred every brutal fibre in him to a fiercer recklessness that halted him in his tracks under the calm stars.
But what held him there was something else, perhaps what he believed had died in him; for he did not even turn again.

And at last, through the dark and throbbing silence he moved on again at random, jaws set.
The mental strain was beginning to distort everything.

Once or twice he laughed all to himself, nodding mysteriously, his tense white face stamped with a ghastly grimace of self-contempt.

Then an infernal, mocking curiosity stirred him: What kind of a thing _was_ he anyway?
A moment since he had loosed the brute in himself, leaving it to her to re-chain or let it carry her with him to destruction.

And yet he was too fastidious to marry her under false pretences! "Gods of Laughter! What in hell--what sort of thing am I ?" he asked aloud, and lurched on, muttering insanely to himself, laughing, talking under his breath, hearing nothing, seeing nothing but her wistful eyes, gazing sorrowfully out of the night.
At a dark crossing he ran blindly into a moving horse; was pushed aside by its cloaked rider with a curse; stood dazed, while his senses slowly returned--first, hearing--and his ears were filled with the hollow trample of many horses; then vision, and in the dark street before him he saw the column of shadowy horsemen riding slowly in fours, knee to knee, starlight sparkling on spur and bit and sabre guard.
Officers walked their lean horses beside the column.