Her loss of self-control gave him an advantage, which he was either too generous or too stupid to perceive.  “Well, forget all about it.  I am going now,” he answered quietly.

While she watched him moving away from her, she was conscious of an inexplicable longing to stab him again more deeply before she lost him forever.  It was intolerable to her that he should leave her while she was still indignant, that he should evade her just resentment by the natural cowardice of flight.

“I can’t forget it,” she said; “how can you expect me to?”

For an instant he seemed on the point of smiling.  Then, turning, at the door, he walked back to where she was standing, and said gravely:  “When I came in here it was to ask you to marry me, and, if it’s the last word I ever speak, I thought you understood—­that you knew how I felt.  I was even fool enough to think you would be willing to marry me.  That’s all I can say.  I haven’t any other excuses.”

For the second time he went to the door, opened it, and then turning quickly, came back again.  “I am not the sort to change, and I shan’t change about this.  You are a free woman, and if you ever feel that you made a mistake, if you ever want me or need me, you can just come to me.  I shan’t stop caring for you, and if you choose to come, I’ll be waiting.  I believed you were meant for me when I first saw you—­and I believe it now.  In spite of all you say, I am going to keep on believing it—­”

He went out, closing the door softly, and five minutes later, feeling extraordinarily young, she watched him pass through the gate, and walk as buoyantly as ever in the direction of Broadway.  While she looked after him she wondered suddenly why novelists always dropped their heroines as soon as they passed twenty-seven?  “If I’d been in a play, they’d have put me in the background, dressed in lavender, and made me look on and do fancywork,” she thought humorously, “but this is real life, and I’ve just had a real love scene on my thirty-eighth birthday.  He couldn’t have been more romantic if I’d been Fanny,” she mused with an agreeable complacency.  “It’s only in books and plays that people stop falling in love when they pass the twenties.  I don’t believe they ever stop in real life.  I believe it goes on forever.”  And glancing at the glass, she added truthfully:  “I want love more to-day than I wanted it when I was twenty—­and so does Ben O’Hara.”

A sensation of stifling, as if her throat were closing together, oppressed her suddenly, and picking up her hand-bag, she ran downstairs and out of the house.