s they towered through the
gloaming.

Edith was pouring the after-dinner coffee. It was the first time they
had dined together. On the other days she had made it a point to be back
in London before nightfall; but she had so far yielded to him now as to
be willing to wait for a later train.

"What sort of reasons?" he urged.

"Oh, I don't know," she said again, pensively, dropping a lump of sugar
into his coffee-cup. She added, while passing the cup to him: "It isn't
so easy for a woman to be--to be drifting about--especially with two
children."

"But why should you have drifted about, when you knew that at a sign
from you--?"

She went on as if he hadn't spoken. "And when I saw you had dismantled
the house and other people were living in it--I couldn't help seeing
that, you know, in driving by--"

"But, good God, Edith, you wouldn't have come back to me?"

She stirred her own coffee slowly. "N-no."

"Does that mean no or yes?"

"Oh, it means no. That is"--she reflected long--"if I _had_ gone back to
you I should have been sorry."

"You would have considered it a weakness--a surrender--"

She nodded. "Something like that."

"And you really had stopped--caring anything about me?"

"It wasn't that so much as--so much as that I couldn't get over my
resentment." She seemed to have found the explanatory word. "That was
it," she continued, with more decision. "That's what I felt:
resentment--a terrible resentment. Whatever compromise I thought of,
that resentment against you for--for doing what you did--blocked the
way. If I'd gone back I should have taken it with me."

"But you don't seem to suffer from it now. Or am I wrong?"

She answered promptly: "No; you're right. That's the strange part of it.
After I married--it left me. It was as if old scores were wiped out.
That isn't precisely what I felt," she hastened to add; "and yet, it was
something _like_ that."

"You'd got even."

She shook her head doubtfully. "N-no. I don't mean that. But the past
seemed to be dissolved--not to exist for me any more."

"H'm! Not to exist for you any more!"

"I said _seemed_. That's what bewildered me--from the beginning: things
I thought I felt--or thought I didn't feel--for a while--only to find
later that it wasn't--wasn't _so_." She went on with difficulty. "For
instance--that day--that day at the Park--I thought that everything was
killed within me. But it wasn't. It came alive again."

"But not so much alive