lt I couldn't leave them, and couldn't
leave you either, I remembered the bracelet; and I sent you off to
telephone while I rushed round the corner to a little jeweller's where
I'd been before, and pawned it so that you shouldn't have to pay for the
children.... But now, darling, you see, if you've got all that money, I
can get it out of pawn at once, can't I, and send it back to her?"

She flung her arms about him, and he held her fast, wondering if the
tears he felt were hers or his. Still he did not speak; but as he
clasped her close she added, with an irrepressible flash of her old
irony: "Not that Ellie will understand why I've done it. She's never yet
been able to make out why you returned her scarf-pin."

For a long time she continued to lean against him, her head on his
knees, as she had done on the terrace of Como on the last night of their
honeymoon. She had ceased to talk, and he sat silent also, passing
his hand quietly to and fro over her hair. The first rapture had been
succeeded by soberer feelings. Her confession had broken up the frozen
pride about his heart, and humbled him to the earth; but it had also
roused forgotten things, memories and scruples swept aside in the first
rush of their reunion. He and she belonged to each other for always:
he understood that now. The impulse which had first drawn them
together again, in spite of reason, in spite of themselves almost, that
deep-seated instinctive need that each had of the other, would never
again wholly let them go. Yet as he sat there he thought of Strefford,
he thought of Coral Hicks. He had been a coward in regard to Coral, and
Susy had been sincere and courageous in regard to Strefford. Yet his
mind dwelt on Coral with tenderness, with compunction, with remorse; and
he was almost sure that Susy had already put Strefford utterly out of
her mind.

It was the old contrast between the two ways of loving, the man's way
and the woman's; and after a moment it seemed to Nick natural enough
that Susy, from the very moment of finding him again, should feel
neither pity nor regret, and that Strefford should already be to her
as if he had never been. After all, there was something Providential in
such arrangements.

He stooped closer, pressed her dreaming head between his hands, and
whispered: "Wake up; it's bedtime."

She rose; but as she moved away to turn on the light he caught her hand
and drew her to the window. They leaned on the sill in the darkne