“What did you expect?” he questioned in his turn.

“But I didn’t want to be found—­I would rather stay lost,” she responded.  Shrinking away from him she went to the window and stood there, pressed closely against the panes, as if in a blind impulse to put the space of the room between them.  “I will not go back even now—­I will not go back,” she insisted.

As he entered he had closed the door behind him, and leaning against it now, he looked at her with a flicker of his quiet smile.

“I’m not talking about going back, am I?” he rejoined.  “Heaven knows you may stay here if you like the place.”  He glanced quickly about the crudely furnished little room hung with cheap crayon portraits.  “It’s rather hard, though, to fit you into these surroundings,” he remarked with a flash of humour.

She shook her head.  “They suit me as well as any other.”

“And the people who live here?—­What of them?”

“I like them because they are so near to the ground,” she answered, “they’ve no surface of culture, or personality, or convention to bother one—­they’ve no surface, indeed, of any kind.”

“Well, it’s all very interesting,” he remarked, smiling, “but, in common decency, don’t you think you might have sent me word?”

“I never thought of you an instant,” she replied.

“You never thought of me in your life,” he retorted, “and yet when I say I’m better worth your thinking of than Kemper—­God knows I don’t pretend to boast.”

A weaker man would have hesitated over the name, but he had seen at the first glance that the way to save her was not by softness, and his lips, after he had uttered the word, closed tightly like the lips of a surgeon who applies the knife.

“Don’t speak to me of him!” she cried out sharply, “I had forgotten!”

Her eyes hung upon his in a returning agony, and it was through this agony alone that he hoped to bring back her consciousness of life.

“This is not the way to forget,” he answered, “you are not a coward, yet you have chosen the cowardly means.  There can he no forgetfulness until you are strong enough to admit the truth to your own heart—­to say ’there is no mistake that is final, no wrong done that has power to crush me.’”

“But there is no truth in my heart,” she answered, with sudden energy, “it is all a lie—­I am a lie all over, and it makes no difference because I have ceased to care.  I used to think that people only died when they were put in coffins, but I know now that you can be dead and yet move and walk about and even laugh and pretend to be like all the rest—­some of whom are dead also.  And I didn’t die slowly,” she added, with a vague impersonal interest, which impressed him as almost delirious in its detachment, “I wasn’t killed in a year, but in a minute.  One instant I was quite alive—­as alive as you are now—­and the next I was as dead as if I had been buried centuries ago.”