A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past.  It was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it.  But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire tohold him fast, face to face with his own words.

Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had mether with another.

“You did think of me, then?  Why are you afraid totell me that you did?”

The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.

“Didn’t my letters tell you so enough?”

“Ah, your letters!” Keeping her gaze on his in a passion ofunrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not theleast quiver of a sensitive nerve.  He only gazed back at her more sadly.

“They went everywhere with me—­your letters,” he said.

“Yet you never answered them.”  At last the accusation trembled to her lips.

“Yet I never answered them.”

“Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?”

All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.

Deering hardly seemed to hear her question.  He merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privilegeswhich such nearness had once implied.

“There were beautiful, wonderful things in them,” he said, smiling.

She felt herself stiffen under his smile.

“You’ve waited three years to tell me so!”

He looked at her with grave surprise.  “And do you resent mytelling you even now?”

His parries were incredible.  They left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindictive desire to drive him against thewall and pin him there.

“No.  Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time—­”

And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting her squarely on her own ground.

“When at the time I didn’t?  But how could I—­at thetime?”

“Why couldn’t you?  You’ve not yet told me?”

He gave her again his look of disarming patience.  “Do I need to?  Hasn’t my whole wretched story told you?”

“Told me why you never answered my letters?”

“Yes, since I could only answer them in one way—­by protesting my love and my longing.”

There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past.  “You mean, then, that you didn’t write because—­”

“Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my wife’s money was gone, and that what I could earn—­I’ve so little gift that way!—­was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated.  It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked andbarred between us.”