He had come down here to New York to make another beginning.  He meant to assert no rights, not even in their common memories, he would make no appeal.  But something that he felt he had forfeited he was going to try to earn back.  What was the thing he sought—­her friendship, or her love?  She knew!  No plea that the inspired rhetoric of passion could be capable of could have convinced her of his love for her and of his need for her love as did the divine absurdity of this attempt of his to show her that she need give him—­nothing.  She knew.  Oh, how she knew!

She stole back into her little kitchen and shut the door and leaned giddily against it, trying to get her breath to coming steadily again.  At last she straightened up and wiped her eyes.  A smile played across her lips; the smile of deep maternal tenderness.  Then she picked up her box of matches and carried them to him in the sitting-room.

He stayed that first evening a little less than an hour, and when he got up to go, she made no effort to detain him.  The thing had been, as its unbroken surface could testify, a highly successful first call.  Before she let him go, though, she asked him how long he was going to be in New York, and on getting a very indeterminate answer that offered a minimum of “two or three days” and a maximum that could not even be guessed at, she said: 

“I hope you’re not going to be too dreadfully busy for us to see a lot of each other.  I wish we might manage it once every day.”

That shook him; for a moment, she thought the lightning was going to strike and stood very still holding her breath, waiting for it.

But he steadied himself, said he could certainly manage that if she could, and as the elevator came up in response to her ring, said that he would call her up in the morning at her office.

She puzzled a little during the intermittent processes of undressing, over why she had let him go like that.  She found it easy to name some of the things that were not the reason.  It was not—­oh, a thousand times it was not!—­that she wasn’t quite sure of him.  There was no expressing the completeness of her certainty that, with a look, a sudden holding out of the hands to him, the release of one little love-cry from her lips, a half-articulate, “Come and take me, Roddy!  That’s all I want!” she could have shattered, annihilated, that brittle restraint of his; released the full tempest of his passion; found herself—­lost herself—­in his embrace.

Certainly it was no doubt of that that had held her back.  And, no more than doubt, was it pride or modesty.  The one thing her whole being was crying out for was a complete surrender to him.

But the real reason seemed rather absurd, when she tried to state it to herself.  She had felt that it would be a brutal thing to do.  Really, her feeling toward him was that of a mother toward a child who, having, he thinks, merited her displeasure, offers her, by way of atonement, some dearly prized possession; an iron fire-engine, a woolly sheep.  What mother wouldn’t accept an offering like that gravely!