She shook her head.  The pitifulness of her, sitting there so spent, so white, blurred his vision again with sudden tears.  But after he had disposed of them, he managed a smile and sat down comfortably in his easy chair.

“You couldn’t find a better person than me to tell it to,” he said.

“You know already,” she protested.  “At least, you know what it comes to.”

“I know the brute fact,” he admitted, “but that and the whole truth are seldom quite the same thing.”

He saw the way her hands locked and twisted together and remembered with a heart-arresting pang, her half-choked cry, “Don’t!  Don’t hurt them like that!” when his own had agonized in such a grip.  But no caress of his could help her now.  He held himself still in his chair and waited.

“The whole truth of this story isn’t any—­prettier than the brute fact.  There weren’t any extenuating circumstances.”

Then she sat erect and faced him.  He was amazed to see a flush of color come creeping into her cheeks.  Her eyes brightened, the brows drew down a little, her voice steadied itself and the words came swiftly.

“I think I must make sure you understand that it isn’t the sort of story that you usually find enveloping that particular brute fact.  I wasn’t deceived nor betrayed by anybody.  There isn’t anybody you can take as a villain.  Just a nice, rather inarticulate boy, whom I met at a dance the evening before he went overseas.”

She broke off there to ask him shortly, “When was it that you went over?”

“Not until September,” he said, “when it looked like a very long chance if we ever got to the front at all.  Of course, you know, we didn’t.  But this was a lot earlier, wasn’t it?”

“The seventeenth of April,” she said.  “We’ll never forget those weeks, any of us, who were in New York doing what we called war work, but it’s hard not to feel that we weren’t different persons somehow.  I don’t mean that to sound like making excuses.  We were more our real selves perhaps than we will ever be again.  Anyhow, we worked harder all day long, and never felt tired, and in the evening most of the people I knew went out a lot, to dinners and dances.

“We could always make ourselves believe, of course, that we were doing that to cheer up the men who were going to France—­and were very likely never coming back.  Like the English women one read about.  The only thing that used to trouble me in those days was a perfectly scorching self-contempt that used to come when I realized that I was enjoying it all; enjoying the emotional thrill of it.  I knew I was getting off cheap.

“I suppose I needn’t have told you all that.  You’d have understood it anyhow.  But that was how I felt when I went to that dance.  As if it would be a relief to do something—­costly.

“It was a uniform dance as far as the men were concerned.  We made ourselves, of course, as—­attractive as we knew how.  Somebody introduced this boy to me with just the look that said, ‘Do be kind to him,’ and that’s what I set out, very resolutely and virtuously, to be.  He couldn’t talk much beyond monosyllables and he couldn’t dance,—­even with me.  I mean, I’ve danced so much ...”