“No, Hugh.  Surely you can’t misjudge me so!” she answered reproachfully.  “Do you think I should have sent for you if I had meant—­that!”

“No, no, I didn’t think so.  But why not?  You—­you cared once, and you tell me plainly you don’t love him.  It was all a terrible mistake.  We were meant for each other.”

“I did love you then,” she said.  “You never knew how much.  And there is nothing I wouldn’t give to bring it all back again.  But I can’t.  It’s gone.  You’re gone, and I’m gone.  I mean what we were.  Oh, why did you change?”

“It was you who changed,” I declared, bewildered.

“Couldn’t you see—­can’t you see now what you did?  But perhaps you couldn’t help it.  Perhaps it was just you, after all.”

“What I did?”

“Why couldn’t you have held fast to your faith?  If you had, you would have known what it was I adored in you.  Oh, I don’t mind telling you now, it was just that faith, Hugh, that faith you had in life, that faith you had in me.  You weren’t cynical and calculating, like Ralph Hambleton, you had imagination.  I—­I dreamed, too.  And do you remember the time when you made the boat, and we went to Logan’s Pond, and you sank in her?”

“And you stayed,” I went on, “when all the others ran away?  You ran down the hill like a whirlwind.”

She laughed.

“And then you came here one day, to a party, and said you were going to Harvard, and quarrelled with me.”

“Why did you doubt met” I asked agitatedly.  “Why didn’t you let me see that you still cared?”

“Because that wasn’t you, Hugh, that wasn’t your real self.  Do you suppose it mattered to me whether you went to Harvard with the others?  Oh, I was foolish too, I know.  I shouldn’t have said what I did.  But what is the use of regrets?” she exclaimed.  “We’ve both run after the practical gods, and the others have hidden their faces from us.  It may be that we are not to blame, either of us, that the practical gods are too strong.  We’ve learned to love and worship them, and now we can’t do without them.”

“We can try, Nancy,” I pleaded.

“No,” she answered in a low voice, “that’s the difference between you and me.  I know myself better than you know yourself, and I know you better.”  She smiled again.  “Unless we could have it all back again, I shouldn’t want any of it.  You do not love me—­”

I started once more to protest.

“No, no, don’t say it!” she cried.

“You may think you do, just this moment, but it’s only because—­you’ve been moved.  And what you believe you want isn’t me, it’s what I was.  But I’m not that any more,—­I’m simply recalling that, don’t you see?  And even then you wouldn’t wish me, now, as I was.  That sounds involved, but you must understand.  You want a woman who will be wrapped up in your career, Hugh, and yet who will not share it,—­who will devote herself body and soul to what you have become.