Her eyelids fluttered nervously, but she did not raise them again.  She leaned instead towards the fire.  Her shoulders were bent.  She looked crushed, as if her vitality were gone, and yet so slender, so young, in her thin wrap.  He clinched his hands with a sharp intake of the breath, and his frown deepened.

“So you won’t speak to me?” he said.  “It’s beyond words, is it?  It’s to be an insurmountable obstacle to happiness for the rest of our lives?  We go back to the old damnable existence we’ve led for so long!  Or perhaps—­” his voice hardened—­“perhaps you think we should be better apart?  Perhaps you would prefer to leave me?”

She flinched at that—­flinched as if he had struck her—­and then suddenly she lifted her white face to his, showing him such an anguish of suffering as he had not suspected.

“Oh, Edward,” she said, “why did this have to happen?  We were so happy before.”

That pierced him—­the utter desolation of her—­the pain that was too deep for reproach.  He bent to her, all the bitterness gone from his face.

“My dear,” he said in a voice that shook, “can’t you see how I loathe myself—­for hurting you—­like this?”

And then suddenly—­so suddenly that neither knew exactly how it happened—­they were linked together.  She was clinging to him with a rush of piteous tears, and he was kneeling beside her, holding her fast pressed against his heart, murmuring over her brokenly, passionately, such words of tenderness as she had never heard from him before.  When in the end she lifted her face to kiss him, it was wet with tears other than her own, and somehow that fact did more to ease her own distress than any consolation he could find to offer.

She slipped her arm about his neck and pressed her cheek to his.  “I’m thankful I know,” she told him tremulously.  “Oh, Edward darling, don’t—­don’t keep anything from me ever again!  If I’d only known sooner, things might have been so different.  I feel as if I have never known you till now.”

“Have you forgiven me?” he said, his grey head bent.

She turned her lips again to his.  “My dear, of course—­of course!” And in a lower voice, “Will you—­tell me about her?  Did she mean very much to you?”

His arm tightened about her.  “My darling, it’s nearly twenty-three years ago that she died.  Yes, I loved her.  But I’ve never wanted her back.  Her life was such an inferno.”  He paused a moment, then as she was silent went on more steadily.  “She was eighteen and I was twenty-two when it began.  I was home for a summer vacation, and she had just come to help her aunt as infant teacher at the school.  All the men were wild about her, but she had no use for any of ’em till I come along.  We met along the shore or on the cliffs.  We met constantly.  We loved each other like mad.  It got beyond all reason—­all restraint.  We didn’t look ahead, either of us.  We were young, and it was so infernally sweet.  I’m not offering any excuse—­only telling you the simple truth.  You won’t understand of course.”