The thing that had amazed her by crowding up into her mind, demanding to be said, was that she forgave him utterly—­if indeed she had anything more to forgive than he.  She’d never thought it before.  Now she realized that it was true.  He was as guiltless of premeditation on that night as she.  If he had yielded to a rush of passion, even while his other instincts felt outraged by the things she had done, hadn’t she yielded too, without ever having tried to tell him certain material facts that might change his feeling?  They’d both been victims, if one cared to put it like that, of an accident; had ventured, incautiously, into the rim of a whirlpool whose irresistible force they both knew.

She fought the realization down with a frantic repression.  It wasn’t—­it couldn’t be true!  Why hadn’t she seen it was true before?  Why must the reflection have come at a moment like this, while he sat there, across the table from her in a public room, laboriously apologizing?

The formality of his phrases got stiffer and finally congealed into a blank silence.

Finally she said, with a gasp:  “I have something to ask you to—­forgive me for.  That’s for leaving you to find out—­where I was, the way you did.  You see, I thought at first that no one would know me, made up and all.  And when I found out I would be recognizable, it was too late to stop—­or at least it seemed so.  Besides, I thought you knew.  I saw Jimmy Wallace out there the opening night, and saw he recognized me, and—­I thought he’d tell you.  And then I kept seeing other people out in front after that, people we knew, who’d come to see for themselves, and I thought, of course, you knew.  And—­I suppose I was a coward—­I waited for you to come.  I wasn’t, as you thought, trying to hurt you.  But I can see how it must have looked like that.”

He said quickly:  “You’re not to blame at all.  I remember how you offered to tell me what you intended to do before you went away, and that I wouldn’t let you.”

Silence froze down on them again.

“I can’t forgive myself,” he said at last, “for having driven you out—­as I’m sure I did—­from your position in the Chicago company.  I went back to the theater to try and find you, three days after—­after that night, but you were gone.  I’ve been trying to find you ever since.  I’ve wanted to take back the things I said that night—­about being disgraced and all.  I was angry over not having known when the other people did.  It wasn’t your being on the stage.  We’re not so bigoted as that.

“I’ve come to ask a favor of you, though, and that is that you’ll let me—­let us all, help you.  I can’t—­bear having you live like this, knocking about like this, where all sorts of things can happen to you.  And going under an assumed name.  I’ve no right to ask a favor, I know, but I do.  I ask you to take your own name again, Rose Aldrich.  And I want you to let us help you to get a better position than this; that is, if you haven’t changed your mind about being on the stage; a position that will have more hope and promise in it.  I want you to feel that we’re—­with you.”