Lucia looked bewildered.  She thought she had followed him in all his subtleties; but she had had difficulty in realizing that he was actually proposing to suppress his poems in deference to her scruples, if she had any.  Some shadowy notion of his meaning was penetrating her now.

“My name,” she said, “will mean nothing to the public.”

“Then you consent?”

“Of course.  It’s absurd to talk about my consent.  Besides, why should I mind now—­when it is all over?”

He was silent for a moment.  When he spoke again, it was by an effort, as if he unwillingly obeyed some superior constraint.  “If it hadn’t been all over would you have minded then?  Would you have refused your consent?”

“To your publishing your own poems?  How could I?”

“To the dedication, I mean.  If it hadn’t been all over, would you have given your consent to that?”

His anxiety had deepened to an agony which seemed to have made his face grow sharp and thin almost as she looked at him.  She judged that this question was vital, and that the truth was required of her.

“No, not to that.  You see, it’s only because it’s all over that I’ve consented now.”

“I see; that’s the condition?  You would never have consented but for that.”

“Why should we talk about that now?”

“I wanted to know the truth.”

“Why should you?  It’s a truth that has nothing to do with things as they are, only with things as they might have been.  Isn’t it enough to be glad that they weren’t, that it is all over, and that this is the end of it?”

Even as she said the words it struck her that there was something ominous in this reiteration.

“But it isn’t all over.  This isn’t the end of it.”

His voice was so low that she could hardly have heard it but for the intense vibration of the tones.  There was a pause in which they seemed still to be throbbing, but with no meaning behind the passionate pulse of sound.

“I didn’t mean to tell you.  I know you’d rather think it wasn’t so.  And I would have let you think it if it hadn’t been for what you told me—­what I made you tell me.”

“I don’t understand.  What did I tell you?”

“You told me the truth.”  He spoke with a sudden savage energy.  “How could I go on lying after that?”

She looked at him with that almost imperceptible twitching of her soft mouth which he knew to be a sign of suffering; and in her eyes there was pain and a vague terror.

“I might have gone on lying to the end, if nothing had depended on it.  But if you tell me that you only give your consent to a thing on one condition, and I know that I can’t possibly fulfil the condition, what am I to do?  Say nothing about it, and do what you would loathe me for doing if you knew?”

Till now she had left the manuscript lying in her lap, where unconsciously her hands covered it with a gentle protecting touch.  But as he spoke she took it up and put it away from her with an irresistible impulse of rejection.  He knew that he was answered.