“If I could have helped, do you think I should have done it?  You don’t understand such things, Molly.”

“No, I don’t understand them.  When love has to cloak cruelty and faithlessness, I can’t see that it’s any better than the thing it excuses.”

“But all love isn’t alike.  I don’t love you in the least as I loved Blossom.  That was a mere impulse, and incident.”

“But how was Blossom to know that? and how am I?”

“One can’t explain it to a woman.  They’re not made of flesh and blood as men are.”

“They’ve had to drill their flesh and blood,” she replied, stern rather than scornful.

“I might have known you’d be hard, Molly.”

When she spoke again her voice had softened.

“Jonathan, it’s no use thinking of me—­go back to Blossom,” she said.

“Not thinking of you won’t make me go back to Blossom.  When that sort of thing is over, it is over once for all.”

“Even if that is true you mustn’t think of me—­because I belong—­every bit of me—­to Abel.”

He stared at her for a moment in silence.  “Then it’s true,” he said at last under his breath.

“It has always been true—­ever since anything was true.”

“But you didn’t always know it.”

“I had to grow to it.  I believe I have been growing to it forever.  Everything has helped me to it—­even my mistakes.”

She spoke quite simply.  Her earnestness was so large that it had swept away her shyness and her self-consciousness, as a strong wind sweeps away the smoke over the autumn meadows.  And yet this very earnestness, this passionate sincerity, added but another fold to the luminous evil of mystery in which she was enveloped.  He could not understand her when she tried to tear the veil away and the terrible clearness of her soul blinded his sight.  Therein lay her charm for him—­he could never reach her, could never possess her even should she seek to approach him.  Behind the mystery of darkness which he might penetrate, there was still the mystery of light.

“If you really care about him like that I don’t see why you gave him up and went away from him,” he said helplessly.  “You wanted to go.  Nobody urged you.  It was your own choice.”

“Yes, that’s what you could never understand.  I wasn’t really going away from him when I went.  I was going to him.  It was a long and a roundabout road, but it was safer.”

“You mean it brought you back in the end?”

“It not only brought me back, it showed me things by the way.  It made me understand about you and Blossom.”

“By Jove!” he exclaimed, and was silent.  The pang of his loss was swallowed up in the amplitude of his wonder.

“Are you going to marry him, Molly?” he asked when the silence had become unbearable.

“If he wants me.  I’m not quite sure that he wants me.  I know he loves me,” she added, “but that isn’t just the same.”