"No," he said slowly, rolling the cigarette between his palms, "I don't mind in the least, if I can be of service to you." "But I was very foolish," Joan persisted, "and--and unkind. I've been sorry ever since...." "Don't be," Matthias begged, his tone so odd that she looked up swiftly and coloured. Thus far everything had gone famously, quite as rehearsed in the theatre of her optimistic fancy; but the new accent in his voice made her suddenly fear lest, after all, the little scene might not play itself out as smoothly as it had promised to. "Don't be," Matthias repeated coolly. "It's quite all right. Take my word for it: as far as I'm concerned you've nothing at all to reproach yourself with." Her flush deepened. "You mean you didn't care--!" Matthias smiled, but not unkindly. "I mean," he said slowly--"neither of us really cared." "Speak for yourself--" Joan cut in with a flash of temper; but he obtained her silence with a gentle gesture. "Please ... I mean, we both lost our heads for a time. That was all there was to it, I think. Naturally it couldn't last. You were wise enough to see that first and--ah--did the only thing you decently could, when you threw me over. I understood that, at once." "But I," she began in a desperate effort to regain lost ground--"I was afraid you'd hate and despise me--" "Not a bit, Joan--believe me, not for an instant. When I had had time to think it all out, I was simply grateful. I could never have learned to hate or despise you--as you put it--whatever happened; but if you hadn't been so sensible and far-sighted, the affair might have run on too far to be remedied. In which case we'd both have been horribly unhappy." This was so far from the attitude she had believed he would adopt, that Joan understood her cause to be worse than forlorn: it was lost; lost, that is, unless it could be saved by her premeditated heroic measure. Fumbling in her bag, she found his ring. "Perhaps you're right," she said with a little sigh. "Anyhow, it's like you to put it that way.... But what I really came for, was to return this." She offered the ring. He looked, startled, from it to her face, hesitated, and took it. "O--thanks!" he said, adding quite truthfully: "I'd forgotten about that"; and tossed it carelessly to his work-table where, rolling across the face of a manuscript, it oscillated momentarily and settling to rest, seemed to wink cynically at its late possessor. Joan blinked hastily in response: there was a transient little mist before her eyes; and momentarily her lips trembled with true emotion. The scene was working out more painfully than she had ever in her direst misgivings dreamed it might. Deep in her heart she had all along nursed the hope that he would insist on her retaining the ring. That would have been like the Matthias of her memories! But now he seemed to think that she ought to be glad thus to disburden her conscience and by just so much to modify her indebtedness to him!