"Till you want me back--till you ask me to come back." He looked at her questioningly. "It must be one thing or the other," she went on. "It's for me to decide what it shall be." "Yes; which of the two possible things. It's for you to decide that. But this state of things isn't possible. If you don't want me back, well, we must make arrangements. If you ask me to come back, you'll mean that you want to forget all this wretchedness and be really friends." Her feeling broke out. "Yes, friends again," she repeated, holding her arms out towards him. "You seem to think things are very easily forgotten," he growled. "God knows I don't think so," she said. "Do you really think that's what I've learnt from life, John?" "At any rate I've got to forget them pretty easily!" She would not trust herself to argue lest in the heat of contention that one forbidden weapon should leap into her hand. "We can neither of us forget. But there's another thing," she said. He would not give up his idea, his theory of what she deserved and of what morality demanded. "You may go for a visit. I shall expect you back in two or three weeks." "Not back to this," she insisted. He shrugged his shoulders and held the paper up between them. "If you don't want me back, well, I shall understand that. But I shan't come back to this." She walked to the door, and looked back; she could not see his face for the paper. She made a little despairing movement with her hands, but turned away again without saying more, and stole quietly out of the room. John Fanshaw dashed his paper to the ground and sprang to his feet. He gave a long sigh. He had been in mortal terror--he thought she was going to talk about the money. That peril was past. He flung his hardly lighted cigar into the grate and walked up and down the room in a frenzy of unhappiness. Yes, that peril was past--she had said nothing. But he knew it was in her heart; and he knew how it must appear to her. Heavens, did it not appear like that to him? But she should never know that he felt like that about it. That would be to give up his grievance, to abandon his superiority, to admit that there was little or nothing to choose between them,--between her, the sinner, and him, who profited by the sin, whose salvation the sin had been, who knew it had been his salvation and had accepted salvation from it. No, no; he must never acknowledge that. He must stick to his position. It was monstrous to think he would own that his guilt was comparable to hers.