"Keep tryst or die!" she sobbed, as she took up her pen. "Oh, Phil! How can I write it, that I must give you up?"
It took a long time to tell him. She wanted to make it perfectly clear to him that it was breaking her heart to do it. She was afraid he wouldn't understand how she felt about not being fit for the kingdom, and it was hard to put down in black and white such a deeply personal, such a spiritual thing as that experience of hearing the voices and answering the call. But in no other way could she explain. Twice she broke down utterly, and with her head on her arms on the little table, cried and sobbed with long shuddering gasps that shook her convulsively. Once she threw the half-finished letter into the fire, saying fiercely in a low tone, "I _can't_! Oh, I _can't_! It would be giving up more than Father Damien did. It's more than I can bear!"
But she remembered again those awful words, "No man, putting his hand to the plough"-- _This_ was looking back. She took another sheet of paper and patiently rewrote all that was on the sheets she had just burned. It was nearly morning when she finally sealed the envelope and crept into bed exhausted by the ordeal. There was no sense of "rising triumphant over pain" to reward her for her sacrifice, but her stern little Puritan conscience found a dreary sort of comfort in the thought that she had followed duty, and that nothing else mattered.
"One doesn't _have_ to be happy," she told herself, over and over.
When she awoke next morning and remembered what she had done, the bottom seemed to drop out of the whole universe, and she felt a hundred years old as she moved languidly about the room at her dressing.
"But I can't go on this way," she exclaimed, catching a glimpse of her wan-eyed reflection in the mirror. "Such a half-hearted sort of giving won't do any good. I shall have to do as the nuns do when they shut their convent gate on the world, shut it entirely and forever. I shall have to put away everything that reminds me of Phil."
She glanced around the room. How many reminders there were, for she had always treasured everything he had ever sent her; books, pictures, little curios picked up on his travels. Even an odd stone he had found on the desert and brought into the Wigwam one day, she used now as a paperweight. An Indian basket he had bought from an old squaw at Hole-in-the-rock held her sewing materials. Just under her hand on the table lay the little book he had given her to read on the train when she was starting home after Jack's accident, "The Jester's Sword." As she fingered it caressingly, it seemed to open of its own accord to the fly-leaf, where was printed the line from Stevenson: "To renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered." And then on the opposite page--"Because he was born in Mars' month the bloodstone became his signet, sure token that undaunted courage would be the jewel of his soul."