“You have no cause to be,” he said.  “Indeed, you have no cause to be.  So far as you are concerned I have never changed.  I am the same man.”

She took one of his hands in hers.

“Philip,” she said, “you must not think hardly of me.  You must not think of me as simply afflicted with the usual woman’s curiosity.  I am not curious at all.  I would rather not know.  But remember that for nearly twenty years you passed out of my life.  You have come back again wonderfully altered.  You do not wish to keep the story of those years for ever a sort of Bluebeards chamber in our lives?”

“Not I,” he answered.  “I would have you do as I have done, rip them out page and chapter, annihilate them utterly.  What have they to do with the life before us?  To you they would seem evil enough, to me they are thronged with horrible memories, with memories which, could I take them with me, would poison heaven itself.  So let us blot them out for ever.  Come to me, Catherine, and help me to forget.”

She looked at him with strained eyes.

“Philip,” she said, “I must understand you.  I must understand what has made you the man you are.”

“Fifteen years in hell has done it,” he answered, fiercely.  “Not even my memory shall ever take me back.”

“If I marry you,” she said, “remember that I marry your past as well as your future.  And there are things—­which need explanation.”

“Well?”

“You have been married.”

“She is dead.”

“You have a son.”

He reeled as though he had been struck, and the silence between them was as the silence of tragedy.

“You see,” she continued, “I am bound to ask you to lift the curtain a little.  Fate or instinct, or whatever you may like to call it, has led me a little way.  I am not afraid to know.  I have seen too much of life to be a hard judge.  But you must hold out your hand and take me a little further.”

“I cannot.”

She held him tightly.  Her voice trembled a little.  “Dear, you must.  I am not an exacting woman, and I love you too well to be a hard judge of anything you might have to tell me.  Ignorance is the only thing which I cannot bear.  Remember how greatly you are changed, you are almost a stranger to me in some of your moods.  I could not have you wandering off into worlds of which I knew nothing.  Sit down by my side and talk to me.  I will ask no questions.  You shall tell me your own way, and what you wish to leave out—­leave it out.  Come, is this so hard a task?”

He seemed frozen into inanition.  His face was like the cast of a dead man’s.  His voice was cold and hopeless.

“The key,” he said, “is gone.  I shall never seek for it, I shall never find it.  I have known what madness is, and I am afraid.  Shall we go into the hall?  I fancy that they are serving tea.”

She looked at him, half terrified, half amazed.

“You mean this as final?” she said, deliberately.  “You refuse to offer any explanation, the explanation which common decency even would require of these things?”