She closed the door softly, but she did not immediately turn round.  The palms of her hands were wet with the cold, frightened sweat of that awful moment.  When she returned, she came to him with a wondering, timid, girlish look in her eyes.

“Oh, Jack, if you only could!” she said, and then only did she put out her hands and let her fingers press over his heart.

The next moment she was swept up in his arms, shrinking and very still.

All at once he put her from him and said roughly: 

“What was his name?”

“No, no!”

“Give me his name,” he said miserably.  “I must know it.”

“No—­neither now nor at any other time,” she said firmly, and her look as it met his had again all the old domination.  “That is my condition.”

“Ah, how weak I have been,” he said to himself, with a last bitter, instinctive revolt.  “How weak I am.”

She saw and understood.

“We must be generous,” she said, changing her voice quickly to gentleness.  “He has been pained enough already.  He alone will suffer.  And if you knew his name it would only make you unhappy.”

He still rebelled, but suddenly to him came a thought which at first he was ashamed to express.

“He doesn’t know?”

She lied.

“No.”

“He’s still waiting—­there?”

“Yes.”

“Ah, he’s waiting,” he said to himself.

A gleam of vanity, of triumph over the discarded, humiliated one, leaped up fiercely within him and ended all the lingering, bitter memories.

“Then you care?” she said, resting her head on his shoulder that he might not see she had read such a thought.

“Care?” he cried.  He had surrendered.  Now it was necessary to be convinced.  “Why, when I received your letter I—­I was wild.  I wanted to do murder.”

“Jackie!”

“I was like a madman—­everything was gone—­nothing was left.”

“Oh, Jack, how I have made you suffer!”

“Suffer?  Yes, I have suffered!” Overcome by the returning pain of the memory, he dropped into a chair, trying to control his voice.  “Yes, I have suffered!”

“Forgive me!” she said, slipping on her knees beside him, and burying her head in his lap.

“I was out of my head—­I don’t know what I did, what I said.  It was as though a bomb had exploded.  My life was wrecked, shattered—­nothing left.”

He felt the grief again, even more acutely.  He suffered for what he had suffered.

“Jack, I never really could have abandoned you,” she cried bitterly.  She raised her eyes toward him and suddenly took notice of the time-tables that lay clutched in his hands.  “Oh, you were going away!”

He nodded, incapable of speech.

“You were running away?”

“I was running away—­to forget—­to bury myself!”

“Oh, Jack!”

“There was nothing here.  It was all a blank!  I was running away—­to bury myself!”