ing to you--don't push me away now!
I am sorrier for my foolishness, and more ashamed of it, than you can
possibly be! I think it was never anything but weakness and vanity that
made me want to flirt with Chris Liggett. I think that if he had once
stopped flattering me, and if ever our meetings had been anything but
stolen fruit, as it were, I would have seen how utterly blind I was! I'm
different now, Wolf; I know that what I felt for him was only shallow
vanity, and that what I feel for you is the deepest and realest love
that any woman ever knew! There's nothing--no minute of the day or night
when I don't need you. There's nothing that you think that isn't what I
think! I want to go West with you, and make a home there, and when you
go to China, or go to India, I want you to go because your wife has
helped you--because you have had happy years of working and
experimenting and picnicking and planning--with me!

"It's all over, Wolf, that Melrose business--that dream! I've said
good-bye to them, and they have to me, and they know I'm never coming
back! I'm a Sheridan now--really and truly--for ever."

And in the lonesome and bitter days in which his great dream had come
true, without Norma to share it, days in which he had been thinking of
her as affiliated more and more with the element he despised, identified
more and more with the man who had wrecked--or tried to wreck--her life,
Wolf had imagined this meeting, and imagined her as tentatively holding
out the olive branch of peace; and he had had time to formulate exactly
what he should answer to such an appeal.

"I'm sorry, Norma," he had imagined himself saying. "I'm terribly sorry!
But just talking doesn't undo these things, just _saying_ that you
didn't mean it, and that it's all over. No, married life can't be picked
up and put down again like a coat. You _were_ my wife, and God knows I
worshipped you--heart and soul! If some day these people get tired of
you, or you get tired of them, that'll be different! But you've cut me
too deep--you've killed a part of me, and it won't come alive again!
I've been through hell--wondering what you were doing, what you were
going to do! I never should have married you; now let's call it all
quits, and get out of it the best way we can!"

But when he saw her, the familiar, lovely face that he had loved for so
many years, when he felt the little gloved hand on his arm, and realized
that somehow, out of the utter desolation a