I and Brodrick and
poor Nina. Could anything be more fatuous, more perverse?"

"Not all of us. Not Owen. He didn't go far wrong when he married Laura."

"Because the beast's clairvoyant. And love only made him more so; while
it makes us poor devils blind as bats."

"There's a dear little bat just gone by us. He's so happy."

"Ah--you should see him trying to fly by daylight."

Silence and the lucid twilight held them close.

"Jinny--do you remember that walk we had once, coming back from
Wendover?"

She did not answer him.

"Jinny--we're there again and where we were then. We've slipped
everything between. Positively, I can't remember now what came between."

It was her state, also. She could have owned it. Only that to her it was
strange and terrible, the facility with which they had annihilated time
and circumstance, all that had come between. It was part of their
vitality, the way they let slip the things that hurt, the way they
plunged into oblivion and emerged new-made.

"We must have gone wrong somewhere, in the beginning," he said.

"Don't let's talk about it any more."

"It's better to talk about it than to bottle it up inside us. That turns
it to poison."

"Yes."

"And haven't we always told the truth to each other?"

"Not in the beginning. If we only had----"

"We didn't know it then."

"_I_ knew it," she said.

"Why didn't you tell me, then?"

"You know what you'd have thought of me if I had."

"You shouldn't have cared what I thought. You should have risked it."

"Risked it?"

"Risked it."

"But I risked losing you altogether. What did _you_ risk?"

He was silent.

"Why do you blame me? It was your fault, your choice."

"Was it really mine? Was it I who went wrong?"

"Yes," she said. "In the beginning. You knew I cared for you."

"If you'd let me see it."

"Oh, you saw it. I didn't tell you in as many words. But I let you see
it. _That_ was where I went wrong."

"Yes, yes." He assented, for it was truth's hour. "You should have made
me _feel_ it."

"How could I?"

"That was it. You couldn't."

"I couldn't when I knew you'd seen it."

"How did you know?"

"Oh--_you_ took good care of that."

"Was I a brute? Was I a brute to you, Jinny?"

She smiled.

"Not as men go. You couldn't help it. There was no deceiving me."

"Why, after all, shouldn't you have told me?"

"Why indeed?"

"It's a preposterous convention that leaves all the truth-telling to the
unh