low that it was permissible for her not to hear them.
Perhaps she meant at first to make use of this privilege, but when a
minute or more had gone by she said: "What for?"

"Partly for the penalties I've had to pay, but chiefly for deserving
them."

It seemed to him that her profile grew pensive. Though it detached
itself clearly enough against the pane, it was a soft profile, a little
blurred in the outline, with delicate curves of nose and lips and
chin--the profile to go with dimpling smiles and a suffused sweetness.
It pained him to notice that, though the suffused sweetness and the
dimpling smiles were still as he remembered them, they didn't keep out
of her face certain lines that had not been there when he saw her last.

"I think I ought to tell you," she said, after long reflection, "that I
understand that sort of sympathy better now than I did some years ago.
One grows more tolerant, if that's the right word, as one grows older."

"Does that mean that if certain things were to do again--you wouldn't do
them?"

She took on an air of dignity. "That's something I can't talk about."

"But you think about it."

"Even so, I couldn't discuss it--with you."

"But I'm the very one with whom you _could_ discuss it. Between us the
conversation would be what lawyers call privileged."

She looked round at him for the first time since entering the
compartment. "Is anything privileged between you and me?"

"Isn't everything?"

"I don't see how."

"We've been man and wife--"

"That's the very reason. No two people seem to me so far apart as those
who've been man and wife--and aren't so any longer."

"And yet, in a way, no two are so near together."

Her eyes were full of mute questioning. He made no attempt to approach
her, but in leaning across the upholstered arm of his seat he seemed to
overcome some of the distance between them.

"No two are so near together," he went on, "for the very reason that
when they're separated outwardly they're bound the more closely by the
things of the heart and the soul and the spirit. After all, those are
the ties that count. The legal dissolving of bonds and making of new
ones is only superficial. It hasn't put you and me asunder--not the you
and me," he hurried on, as something in her expression and attitude
seemed to indicate dissent, "not the you and me that are really
essential. No court and no judge could dissolve the union we entered
into when you were twenty-one an