u thought that--really--after reading it?"

"I thought it."

Her heart leaped up to her throat. "Then why are you here today?"

He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. "God knows--if you can ask
me that!"

"You see I was right to say I didn't understand."

He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking the view over the
river and the checkered slopes. "Perhaps I might say so too."

"No, no: we must neither of us have any reason for saying it again."
She looked at him gravely. "Surely you and I needn't arrange the lights
before we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as I
am, with all my irrational doubts and scruples; the old ones and the new
ones too."

He came back to his seat beside her. "Never mind the old ones. They were
justified--I'm willing to admit it. With the governess having suddenly
to be packed off, and Effie on your hands, and your mother-in-law ill,
I see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at the
moment, it was difficult to write and explain. But what does all that
matter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle."

Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near, so sure, that
to strain it closer might be like a child's crushing a pet bird in its
caress. But her very security urged her on. For so long her doubts had
been knife-edged: now they had turned into bright harmless toys that she
could toss and catch without peril!

"You didn't come, and you didn't answer my letter; and after waiting
four months I wrote another." "And I answered that one; and I'm here."

"Yes." She held his eyes. "But in my last letter I repeated exactly what
I'd said in the first--the one I wrote you last June. I told you then
that I was ready to give you the answer to what you'd asked me in
London; and in telling you that, I told you what the answer was."

"My dearest! My dearest!" Darrow murmured.

"You ignored that letter. All summer you made no sign. And all I ask now
is, that you should frankly tell me why."

"I can only repeat what I've just said. I was hurt and unhappy and
I doubted you. I suppose if I'd cared less I should have been more
confident. I cared so much that I couldn't risk another failure. For
you'd made me feel that I'd miserably failed. So I shut my eyes and set
my teeth and turned my back. There's the whole pusillanimous truth of
it!"

"Oh, if it's the WHOLE truth!----" She let him clasp her. "There's my
torment, yo