“Do you think I might do that?”

“How do I know what you may do?” he returned.  “You threw me into the discard when your fancy turned to some one else.  You followed your own bent with a certain haste as soon as I was reported dead.  I had ceased to be man enough for you, but my money was still good enough for you.  When I recall those things, I think I can safely say that I haven’t the least idea what you may do next.  You aren’t faring any too well.  That’s plain enough.  I have seen men raise Cain out of sheer devilishness, out of a desperate notion to smash everything because they were going to smash themselves.  Some people seem able to amuse themselves by watching other people squirm.  Maybe you are like that.  You had complete power over me once.  I surrendered to that gladly, then.  You appear to have a faculty of making men dance to any tune you care to play.  But all the power you have now, so far as I’m concerned, is to make me suffer a little more by giving the whole ugly show away.  No, I haven’t the least idea what you may do.  I don’t know you at all.”

“My God, no, you don’t,” she flung out.  “You don’t.  If you ever had, we wouldn’t be where we are now.”

“Probably it’s as well,” Hollister returned.  “Even if you had been true, you’d have faltered when I came back looking like this.”

“And that would have been worse than what I did do,” she said, “wouldn’t it?”

“Are you justifying it as an act of mercy to me?” he asked.

Myra shook her head.

“No.  I don’t feel any great necessity for justifying my actions.  No more than you should feel compelled to justify yours.  We have each only done what normal human beings frequently do when they get torn loose from the moorings they know and are moved by forces within them and beyond them, forces which bewilder and dismay them.  The war and your idea of duty, of service, pried us apart.  Natural causes—­natural enough when I look back at them—­did the rest.  We all want to be happy.  We all grab at that when it comes within reach.  That’s all you and I have done.  We will probably continue doing that the same as every one else.”

“I have it,” Hollister said defiantly.  “That is why I don’t want any ghosts of the old days haunting me now.”

“If you have, you are very fortunate,” she murmured.  “But don’t leave your wife alone in a city throbbing with the fevered excitement and uncertainty of war, where every one’s motto is a short life and a merry one!  Not if she’s young and hot-blooded, if she has grown so accustomed to affection and caresses that the want of them afflicts her with a thirst like that of a man lost in a desert.  Because if she has nothing to do but live from day to day on memories and hopes, there will be a time when some man at hand will obscure the figure of the absent one.  That is all that happened to me, Robin.  I longed for you.  Then I began to resent your complete absorption by the war machine.  Then