irritation, as if some one had accused him of being faithless.

"Do you think it's strange that I should feel and speak like this?"
Myra persisted. "Do people never profit by their mistakes? Am I so
unlovable a creature? Couldn't you either forget or forgive?"

He shook his head.

"It isn't that." His voice sounded husky, uncertain. "We can't undo
what's done, that's all. I cross no more bridges before I come to
them."

"Don't mistake me, Robin," she said with a self-conscious little
laugh. "I'm no lovesick flapper. Neither am I simply a voluptuous
creature seeking a new sensation. I don't feel as if I couldn't live
without you. But I do feel as if I could come back to you again and it
would be a little like coming home after a long, disappointing
journey. When I see you suffering, I want to comfort you. If she makes
you suffer, I shall be unhappy unless I can make you feel that life
still holds something good. If I could do that, I should perhaps find
life good myself. And it doesn't seem much good to me, any more. I'm
still selfish. I want to be happy. And I can't find happiness
anywhere. I look back to our old life and I envy myself. If the war
marred your face and made you suffer, remember what it has done to me.
Those months and months that dragged into years in London. Oh, I know
I was weak. But I was used to love. I craved it. I used to lie awake
thinking about you, in a fever of protest because you could not be
there with me, in a perfect passion of resentment at the circumstances
that kept you away; until it seemed to me that I had never had you,
that there was no such man, that all our life together was only a
dream. Think what the war did to us. How it has left us--you scarred
and hopeless; I, scarred by my passions and emotions. That is all the
war did for any one--scarred them, those it didn't kill. Oh, Robin,
Robin, life seems a ghastly mockery, sometimes. It promises so much
and gives so little."

She bent her head. Her shoulders shook with sobs she tried to
strangle. Hollister put his hand on the thick coils of honey-colored
hair. He was sorry for her--and for himself. And he was disturbed to
find that the touch of her hair, the warm pressure of her hands on his
knee, made his blood run faster.

The curious outbreak spent itself. She drew herself away from him, and
rising to her feet without a word she walked rapidly away along the
path by the river.

Hollister looked after her. He was trouble