“There is no need to ask,” he said, and retreated to his chair. “The change since then is too great. I am not the same, and you are not the same.” He glanced at his stiff arm and his ill-fitting clothing. “Nothing can ever be the same again.” She was studying how she might win him, if only temporarily. Certain plans were no longer fluid, and she believed she could use him. “That doesn’t sound like you, Curtis.” “Sibyl,” he threw out his stiff arm with a protesting gesture, “I hope you are not trying to play with me, as a cat with a mouse. You know how I have always felt toward you. You know that even after you sold yourself to that man Plimpton, I——” She commanded silence by putting her fingers to her lips; and tip-toeing to the door she closed it, that Mary might not by any chance hear his unguarded words. “Even after that I would have taken you back gladly, and could have forgiven you and loved you, for I was always a fool about you. You will pardon me for speaking so plainly? I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I went away, as you know, and have tried to find peace by burying myself from the world. And I have found peace, of a certain kind. But I am not the same as I was. I hope I am not as weak as I was.” Yet he knew he had at that moment no more stability than water. If he could have believed any protestation she might make, he would have done so joyfully, and would have gone far to purchase such a belief. “I have been a great fool in many ways,” she admitted. “But I hope not a bigger fool than the man who pitches himself headlong out of the living world into a desert simply because he and his wife have agreed to a separation. But as you say, all that is past, and there is no need to talk about it. Now I want to forget it and be your friend, if I can’t be anything else.” “What else would you be?” He spoke in a hoarse voice. “At present, just your friend. You need a friend, and I need one. We have been enemies a good while. Let us forget that, and be friends again.” “Mere friendship with you would never satisfy me, Sibyl. You know that as well as I do. Unless I could be your husband, and hold you heart-true to me as my wife, I could never be anything to you.” Though shaken by his emotions he spoke with unusual determination. Thoughts of Plimpton aroused whatever militant manhood there was in him. For the instant he felt that he ought to have killed Plimpton, and that his flight had been the flight of a coward. Sibyl saw that she was approaching him from the wrong side. “Yet mere friendship, as you call it, is a good thing. The friendship between Mary and myself, for instance, and that between you and Justin—you will not say they are worthless. You even came up to Denver, I think, to see Justin, because you could not bear to be separated long from him.” He looked at her earnestly, with a mental question. “Don’t put your hands on him!”