Elfrida snatched it away with a little shiver at the contact, a little angry shiver of surprised nerves.

He looked at her piteously, struggling for a word, for any word to send away her repulsion, to bring her back to the mood of the moment before.

But he could not find it; he seemed to have drifted hopelessly from her, to have lost all his reckonings.
"Well ?" she said.

She was held there partly by her sense of pity and partly by her desire to see the last, the very last of it.
"Go!" he returned, with a shrinking of pain at the word, "I cannot." "_Pauvre ami!_" she said softly, and then she turned, and her light steps sounded back to him through the length of the hall.
She walked more slowly when she reached the pavement outside, and one who met her might have thought she indulged in a fairly pleasant reverie.

A little smile curved about the corners of her mouth, half compassionate, half amused and triumphant.