ur old
apartment."

She blushed to her hair: "Were you annoyed with me because I left it?"

"It hurt."

"But Clive!--I _couldn't_ remain,--after you had become engaged to
marry."

"Did you need to leave everything you owned?"

"They were not mine," she said in a low, embarrassed voice.

"Whose then?"

"Yours. I never considered them mine.... As though I were a girl of
little consideration ... who paid herself, philosophically, for what
she had lost.... Like a man's mistress after the inevitable break has
come--"

"Don't say that!"

She shrugged her pretty shoulders: "I am a woman old enough to know
what the world is, and what women do in it sometimes; and what men
do.... And I am this sort of woman, Clive: I can give, I can receive,
too, but only because of the happiness it bestows on the giver. And
when the sympathy which must exist between giver and receiver ends,
then also possession ends, for me.... Why do you look at me so
seriously?"

But he dared not say. And presently she went on, happily, and at
random: "Of course I kept Hafiz and the first thing you ever gave
me--the gun-metal wrist-watch. Here it is--" leaning across him and
pulling out a drawer in her dresser. "I wear it every day when I am
out. It keeps excellent time. Isn't it a darling, Clive?"

He examined it in silence, nodded, and returned it to her. And she
laid it away again, saying:

"So you think of taking my old apartment? How odd! And how very
sentimental of you, Clive."

He said, forcing a light tone: "Nothing has ever been disturbed there.
It's all as it was when you left. Even your gowns are hanging in the
closets--"

"Clive!"

"We'll go around if you like. Would you care to see it again?"

"Y--yes."

"Then we'll go together, and you can investigate closets and bureaus
and dressers--"

"Clive! Why did you let those things remain?"

"I didn't care to have anybody else take that place."

"Do you know that what you have done is absurdly and frightfully
sentimental?"

"Is it?" he said, trying to laugh. "Well that snivelling and false
sort of sentiment is about the best that such men as I know how to
comfort themselves with--when it's too late for the real thing."

"What do you mean?"

"Just what I am saying. Cheap minds are fed with false sentiment; and
are comforted.... I made out of that place a smug little monument to
you--while you were living alone and almost penniless in a shabby
rooming house on--"

"Oh,