Their meeting was a shock to both of them; an incredible mocking sort of anti-climax.

He was standing near the foot of the stairs when she came down, with a raincoat on, and a newspaper twisted up in his hands, and at sight of her, he took off his soft wet hat, and crunched it up along with the newspaper.  He moved over toward her, but stopped two or three feet away.  “It’s very good of you to come,” he said, his voice lacking a little of the ridiculous stiffness of his words, not much.  “Is there some place where we can talk a little more—­privately than here?  I shan’t keep you long.”

“There’s a room here somewhere,” she said.  “I noticed it this morning when we came in.  Oh, yes!  It’s over there.”

The room she led him to, was an appropriately preposterous setting for the altogether preposterous talk that ensued between them.  It had a mosaic floor with a red plush carpet on it, two stained glass windows in yellow and green, flanking an oak mantel, which framed an enormous expanse of mottled purple tile, with a diminutive gas log in the middle.  A glassy looking oak table occupied most of the room, and the chairs that were crowded in around it were upholstered in highly polished coffee-colored horse-hide, with very ornate nails.  A Moorish archway with a spindling grill across the top, gave access to it.  The room served, doubtless, to gratify the proprietor’s passion for beauty.  The flagrant impossibility of its serving any other purpose, had preserved it in its pristine splendor.  One might imagine that no one had ever been in there, barring an occasional awed maid with a dust cloth, until Rodney and Rose descended on it.

“It’s dreadfully hot in here,” Rose said.  “You’d better take off your coat.”  She squeezed in between the table and one of the chairs, and seated herself.

Rodney threw down his wet hat, his newspaper, and then his raincoat, on the table, and slid into a chair opposite her.

If only one of them could have laughed!  But the situation was much too tragic for that.

“I want to tell you first,” Rodney said, and his manner was that of a schoolboy reciting to his teacher an apology that has been rehearsed at home under the sanction of paternal authority, “I want to tell you how deeply sorry I am for ...  I want to say that you can’t be any more horrified over what I did—­that night than I am.”

He had his newspaper in his hands again and was twisting it up.  His eyes didn’t once seek her face.  But they might have done so in perfect safety, because her own were fixed on his hands and the newspaper they crumpled.

He didn’t presume to ask her forgiveness, he told her.  He couldn’t expect that; at least not at present.  He went on lamely, in broken sentences, repeating what he’d said, in still more inadequate words.  He was unable to stop talking until she should say something, it hardly mattered what.  And she was unable to say anything.  There was a reason for this: