,
not a penny to come by anyhow; so it wasn't with mine I could do it. But
I could do it with yours," she amazingly wound up--"if I could once get
yours out of you."

He faced straight about again--his eyebrows higher than they had ever
been in his life. "Mine? What penny of it was mine? What scrap beyond a
bare, mean little living had I ever pretended to have?"

She held herself still a minute, visibly with force; only her eyes
consciously attached to the seat of a chair the back of which her
hands, making it tilt toward her a little, grasped as for support.
"You pretended to have enough to marry me--and that was all I afterward
claimed of you when you wouldn't."

He was on the point of retorting that he had absolutely pretended to
nothing--least of all to the primary desire that such a way of stating
it fastened on him; he was on the point for ten seconds of giving
her full in the face: "I never _had_ any such dream till you
yourself--infatuated with me as, frankly, you on the whole appeared to
be--got round me and muddled me up and made me behave as if in a way
that went against the evidence of my senses." But he was to feel as
quickly that, whatever the ugly, the spent, the irrecoverable truth, he
might better have bitten his tongue off: there beat on him there this
strange and other, this so prodigiously different beautiful and dreadful
truth that no far remembrance and no abiding ache of his own could
wholly falsify, and that was indeed all out with her next words.
"That--_using_ it for you and using you yourself for your own
future--was my motive. I've led my life, which has been an affair,
I assure you; and, as I've told you without your quite seeming to
understand, I've brought everything fivefold back to you."

The perspiration broke out on his forehead. "Everything's mine?" he
quavered as for the deep piercing pain of it.

"Everything!" said Kate Cookham.

So it told him how she had loved him--but with the tremendous effect
at once of its only glaring out at him from the whole thing that it was
verily she, a thousand times over, who, in the exposure of his youth and
his vanity, had, on the bench of desolation, the scene of yesterday's
own renewal, left for him no forward steps to take. It hung there for
him tragically vivid again, the hour she had first found him sequestered
and accessible after making his acquaintance at his shop. And from this,
by a succession of links that fairly clicked to his ear