He drew up his chair near her (he had not to wait for any invitation to do that now), and she noticed the trembling of his hands as he spread the manuscript on his knees.  He had always been nervous in approaching the subject of his poems, and she said to herself, “Has he not got over that?”

Apparently he had not got over it; for he sat there for several perceptible moments sunk in the low chair beside her, saying nothing, only curling and uncurling the sheets with the same nervous movement of his hand.  She came to his help smiling.

“What is it?  New poems?”

“No, I don’t think I can call them new.  I wrote them four or five years ago.”

He saw that some of the gladness died out of her face, and he wondered why.

“Were you going to read them to me?”

“Good Heavens, no.”  He laughed the short laugh she had heard once or twice before that always sounded like a sob.

“I don’t want to read them to you.  I want to give them to you—­”

“To read?” She held out her hand.

“Yes, to read, of course, but not now.”

The hand was withdrawn, evidently with some distressing consciousness of its precipitancy.

“You said the other night that you would have been glad to know that you had done something for me; and somehow I believe you meant it.”

“I did, indeed.”

“If you read these things you will know.  There’s no other way in which I could tell you; for you will see that they are part of what you did for me.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will, though, when you’ve read them.  That,” he said meditatively, “is why I don’t want you to read them now.”  But then it struck him that he had blundered, introducing a passionate personal revelation under the dangerous veil of mystery.  He had not meant to say, “What you have done for me was to make me love you,” but, “I have done a great thing, and what you did for me was to make me do it.”  For all that she should know, or he acknowledge, the passion was the means, not the end.

“I don’t want to be cryptic, and perhaps I ought to explain a little.  I meant that you’ll see that they’re the best things I’ve written, and that I should not have written them if it had not been for you.  I don’t know whether you’ll forgive me for writing them, but I think you will.  Because you’ll understand that I had to.”

“Have you published any of them?”

It seemed to him that the question was dictated by a sudden fear.

“Rather not.  I want to talk to you about that later on, when you’ve read them.”

“When will you want them back?”

“I don’t want them back at all.  I brought them for you to keep.”

“To keep?”

“Yes, if you care for them.”

“But this is the original manuscript?” She was most painfully aware of the value of the thing.

He smiled.  “Yes, I couldn’t give you a copy, because there isn’t one.”