“Which is worse, d’you think, a sinful muddle? or a muddling sin?”

“Oh, don’t ask me, my dear.  I can’t see any difference.”

“My God—­nor I!”

“There’s no good talking.  You’re so obstinate, Wallie, that I believe, if you could live your life over again, you’d do just the same.”

“I would, probably.  Just the same.”

“There’s nothing you’d alter?”

“Nothing.  Except one thing.”

“What thing?”

“Never mind what.”

“I don’t mind, if the one thing wasn’t me—­was it?”

He did not answer.

“Was it?” she insisted, turning the full blue blaze of her eyes on him.

He started.  “Of course it wasn’t.  You don’t suppose I’d have said so if it had been, do you?”

“A-ah!  So, if you could live your life over again, you wouldn’t turn me out of it?  I didn’t take up much room, did I?  Only two years.”

“Two years?”

“That was all.  And you’d let me stay in for my two poor little years.  Well, that’s something.  It’s a great deal.  It’s more than some women get.”

“Yes.  More than some women get.”

“Poor Wallie.  I’m afraid you wouldn’t live your life again.”

“No.  I wouldn’t.”

“I would.  I’d live mine, horrors and all.  Just for those two little years.  I say, if we’d keep each other in for those two years, we needn’t turn each other out now, need we?”

“Oh no, oh no.”

His brain followed her lead, originating nothing.

“See here,” she said, “if I come in—­”

“Yes, yes,” he said vaguely.

He was bending forward now, with his hands clasped on the table.  She stretched out her beautiful white arms and covered his hands with hers, and held them.  Her eyes were full-orbed, luminous, and tender.  They held him, too.

“I come in on my own terms, this time, not yours.”

“Oh, of course.”

“I mean I can’t come in on the same terms as before.  All that was over nine years ago, when you married.  You and I are older.  We have had experience.  We’ve suffered horribly.  We know.”

“What do we know?”

She let go his hands.

“At least we know the limits—­the lines we must draw.  Fifteen years ago we didn’t know anything, either of us.  We were innocents.  You were an innocent when you left me, when you married.”

“When I married?”

“Yes, when you married.  You were a blessed innocent, or you couldn’t have done it.  You married a good woman.”

“I know.”

“So do I. Well, I’ve given one or two men a pretty bad time, but you may write it on my tombstone that I never hurt another woman.”

“Of course you haven’t.”

“And I’m not going to hurt your wife, remember.”

“I’m stupid, I don’t think I understand.”

“Can’t you understand that I’m not going to make trouble between you and her?”