“No.  I would have; but he saw the danger and fled from it—­fled from the punishment that I would have meted out to him to a harder that Fate had in store for him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Just outside my gate he was knocked down by a car and very badly injured; it is hardly probable that he will live.  The people who knocked him down came hammering on my door.  We got him to the Cottage Hospital.  In spite of everything I felt sorry for the poor wretch—­but that has nothing to do with it now.  I came to tell you what happened.”

“And yet do not ask me to explain?”

“Of course not!” He swung round and faced her for a moment.  “Do you think I would put that indignity on you, Joan?”

“You are very generous, Johnny—­why?”

She waited, listening expectantly for his answer.  It was some time in coming.

“I am not generous.  I simply know that for you to be other than honourable and innocent, pure and good, would be an impossibility.”

“Why do you know that?”

“Because I know you.”

She smiled.  The answer she had almost dreaded to hear had not come.  Yet it should have been so simple, so ample an answer to her question.  Had he said, “Because I love you,” it would have been enough; but he had said, “Because I know you”; and so she smiled.

“Johnny, I have something to say to you.  Do you remember the day when you asked me to be your wife?  I was frank and open to you then, was I not?”

“You always are.”

“I told you that if you wished it I would agree, but that I did not love you as a woman should love the man to whom she gives her life.”

“I do not forget that.”

“Perhaps in your heart you harboured a hope that one day the love that I denied you then might come?”

“I think I did.”

“You were giving so much and asking for so little in return.  That was not fair, and it would not be fair for me to allow you to harbour a hope that can never come true.”

He turned slowly and looked at her.

“A woman cannot love—­twice,” she said slowly.

Johnny Everard flushed, then paled.

“Why do you say that?”

“Because it is true.”  She paused; the red dyed her cheeks.  “What you were told last night were lies—­poor lies.  You do not ask me to deny them, dear, and so I won’t.  Yet, behind those lies, there was a little truth.  There is a man, and I cared for him—­care for him now and always shall care for him.  He has been nothing to me, and never will be; but because he lived, because he and I have met, the hope that you had in your heart that day, can come to nothing.  And now—­now I have something more to tell you.  It is this.  You, who can love so finely, must ask for and have love in return.  You think you love me, yet because I do not respond you will tire in time of that love.  You will realise how bad a bargain you have made, and then you will regret