“Only your saying what you’ve said now.  That it didn’t matter—­that it made no difference to you what I did.  But, you see, it made all the difference.  And there we were.”

“It didn’t—­really.”

She shook her head.  “We thought it did.”

“No.  Do you remember that morning I fetched you from Holloway?

“Yes.”  And she said as he had said then, “I don’t want to talk about it.  I don’t want to think about it—­except that it was dear of you.”

“And yet it was from that morning—­from five-thirty a.m.—­that we seemed to go wrong.

“There’s something I wanted most awfully to say, if you could stand going back to it for just one second.  Do you remember saying that I didn’t care?  That I never thought of you when you were in prison or wondered what you were feeling? That’s what put me off.  It hurt so atrociously that I couldn’t say anything.

“It wasn’t true that I didn’t think about you.  I thought about nothing else when I wasn’t working; I nearly went off my head with thinking.

“And you said I didn’t listen to what you told me.  That wasn’t true.  I was listening like anything.”

“Darling—­what did I tell you?”

“Oh—­about the thing you called your experience, or your adventure, or something.”

“My adventure?”

“That’s what you called it.  A sort of dream you had in prison.  I couldn’t say anything because I was stupid.  It was beyond me.  It’s beyond me now.”

“Never mind my adventure.  What does it matter?”

“It matters awfully.  Because I could see that it meant something big and important that I couldn’t get the hang of.  It used to bother me.  I kept on trying to get it, and not getting it.”

“You poor dear!  And I’ve forgotten it.  It did feel frightfully big and important and real at the time.  And now it’s as if it had happened to somebody else—­to Veronica or somebody—­not me.”

“It was much more like Veronica.  I do understand the rest of that business.  Now, I mean.  I own I didn’t at the time.”

“It’s all over, Frank, and forgotten.  Swallowed up in the War.”

“You’re not swallowed up.”

“Perhaps I shall be.”

“Well, if you are—­if I am—­all the more reason why I want you to know that I understand what you were driving at.  It was this way, wasn’t it?  You’d got to fight, just as I’ve got to fight.  You couldn’t keep out of it any more than I can keep out of this War.”

“You couldn’t stay out just for me any more than I can stay out for just you.”

“And in a sort of way I’m in it for you.  And in a sort of way you were in it—­in that damnable suffrage business—­for me.”

“How clever of you,” she said, “to see it!”

“I didn’t see it then,” he said simply, “because there wasn’t a war on.  We’ve both had to pay for my stupidity.”

“And mine.  And my cowardice.  I ought to have trusted you to see, or risked it.  We should have had three—­no, two—­years.”