er and
weaker. He held out his hands. But she hesitated.

"Dear," she said, "you make me very happy. It is wonderful to think
this may come after all these years. But there is something which I
wish to say to you first."

"Well?"

"You are very, very dear to me now--as you are--but you are not the man
I loved years ago. You are a very different person indeed. Sometimes I
am almost afraid of you.

"You have no cause to be," he said. "Indeed, you have no cause to be.
So far as you are concerned I have never changed. I am the same man."

She took one of his hands in hers.

"Philip," she said, "you must not think hardly of me. You must not
think of me as simply afflicted with the usual woman's curiosity. I am
not curious at all. I would rather not know. But remember that for
nearly twenty years you passed out of my life. You have come back again
wonderfully altered. You do not wish to keep the story of those years
for ever a sort of Bluebeards chamber in our lives?"

"Not I," he answered. "I would have you do as I have done, rip them out
page and chapter, annihilate them utterly. What have they to do with
the life before us? To you they would seem evil enough, to me they are
thronged with horrible memories, with memories which, could I take them
with me, would poison heaven itself. So let us blot them out for ever.
Come to me, Catherine, and help me to forget."

She looked at him with strained eyes.

"Philip," she said, "I must understand you. I must understand what has
made you the man you are."

"Fifteen years in hell has done it," he answered, fiercely. "Not even
my memory shall ever take me back."

"If I marry you," she said, "remember that I marry your past as well as
your future. And there are things--which need explanation."

"Well?"

"You have been married."

"She is dead."

"You have a son."

He reeled as though he had been struck, and the silence between them was
as the silence of tragedy.

"You see," she continued, "I am bound to ask you to lift the curtain a
little. Fate or instinct, or whatever you may like to call it, has led
me a little way. I am not afraid to know. I have seen too much of life
to be a hard judge. But you must hold out your hand and take me a
little further."

"I cannot."

She held him tightly. Her voice trembled a little. "Dear, you
must. I am not an exacting woman, and I love you too well to be a
hard judge of anything you might have to tell me. Ignorance is the o