his man with a perfect
reasonableness, and tell him what nobody else was likely to. "It's your
being here. She can't help going back. She remembers how things used to
be. And then she gets apprehensive."

"How they used to be," Jeff repeated thoughtfully. He sounded stupid
standing there and able, apparently, to do nothing better than repeat.
"How was that? How do you understand they used to be?"

Reardon lost patience. You could afford to, evidently, with so numb an
antagonist.

"Why, you know," he said. "You remember how things used to be."

Jeff looked full at him now, and there was a curious brightness in his
eyes.

"I don't," he said. "I should have said I did, but now I hear you talk I
give you my word I don't. You'll have to tell me."

"She never blamed you," said Reardon expansively. He was beginning to
pity Jeff, the incredible density of him, and he spoke incautiously.
"She understood the reasons for it. You were having your business
worries and you were harassed and nervous. Of course she understood. But
that didn't prevent her from being afraid of you."

"Afraid of me!" Jeff took a step forward and put one hand on a pillar of
the porch. The action looked almost as if he feared to trust himself,
finding some weakness in his legs to match this assault upon the heart.
"Esther afraid of me?"

Reardon, feeling more and more benevolent, dilated visibly.

"Most natural thing in the world. You can see how it would be. I suppose
her mind keeps harking back, going over things, you know; and here you
are on the same street, as you might say."

"No," said Jeff, stupidly, as if that were the case in point, "it isn't
the same street."

He withdrew his hand from the pillar now with a decisiveness that
indicated he had got to depend on his muscles at once, and started down
the steps. Reardon made an indeterminate movement after him and called
out something; but Jeff did not halt. He went along the driveway, past
the proudly correct shrubs and brilliant turf and into the street. He
had but the one purpose of getting to Esther as soon as possible. As he
strode along, he compassed in memory all the seasons of passion from
full bloom to withering since he saw her last. When he went away from
her to fulfil his sentence, he had felt that identity with her a man
must recognise for a wife passionately beloved. He had left her in a
state of nervous collapse, an ignoble, querulous breakdown, due, he had
to explain to h