“It isn’t you,” he told her.  “It’s just—­the situation.  I can’t help feeling that I’m taken—­on approval.  Oh, it’s got to be like that!  There are things that, with all the forgiveness in the world, you can’t forget.  And until you have seen that I am different, that I have made myself different....”

“What things?” she demanded.

“Well—­a thing,” he amended.  “You know what I mean.  The night I came to the stage door of the Globe for you.”

She colored at that, and then, to his amazement, she smiled.

“I’ve been such a coward about that,” she said.  “I’ve tried to tell you a dozen times up here, and I’ve been afraid you’d be—­shocked.  I expect you will be, now.  But I’ve got to tell you just the same.

“Roddy, when you were talking to me, there in the hotel at Dubuque, telling me how horrified you were over that, it came over me all at once that I had nothing to forgive; that if the thing was a fault at all, it was mine as much as yours, and that it wasn’t so much of a fault as an—­accident.  You couldn’t help hating me, and you couldn’t help loving me.  And you did both at once.  And I, when I could have told you something that would have made you—­well, hate me less, anyhow—­didn’t take the trouble.  I said to myself then that it was too bad it happened, but that it wasn’t, at least, your fault.  And I was afraid to tell you so.

“But, Roddy, during these last months, down here in New York, I’ve been—­glad it happened.  It’s been something to hold on to, that your love of me was strong enough, so that the hate couldn’t kill it.  It helped me to hope that it would be strong enough, some day or other, to bring you back to me.  And without that hope, I couldn’t have gone on.  It’s what I have lived on.  The only thing that any of my—­successes has meant has been that perhaps it brought that nearer.”

She gave a shaky laugh.  “On approval!” Her eyes filled again.  “Roddy, you can’t mean that.”

She came over and sat down in his lap, and slid her arm around his neck.

“This is where we’ll begin!” she said.  “That I’ll never—­whatever happens—­walk out on you again.  Whether things go well or badly with us, we’ll work it out, somehow, together.”

It was not until she heard the long shuddering sigh he drew at that, and felt him go limp under her, that she realized how genuine his fear had been—­the perfectly preposterous fear that if their new experiment didn’t come up to her anticipation she’d tell him so, and leave him once more.  This time for good.

It was a good while before they took up a rational discussion again, but at last she said: 

“It will take working out, though.  We’ve been shirking that.  Hadn’t we better begin?”

He assented.  “Only, you’ll have to get up,” he said, “and sit down somewhere else.  Out of reach.”

She smiled as she obeyed him.  “It’s hard for a woman to remember,” she said, “that a man can’t think about other things when he’s making love, and can’t think about the person he’s in love with when he’s doing other things.  Because, that’s about the easiest thing a woman does.”