“Oh--don’t!” he said. “Don’t, Christine!” He burst out with a sudden anger. “Why have you come back? I--I wanted to forget, forget always.” She reached for his hand, touched it with fingers that were still cold. “And we are going to forget--going to forget it quite, for just a little hour, Harry, Harry darling!” Her voice, on the old remembered note of fondness, touched him with a strange power. Something crumbled in him. He sat down suddenly in the indicated chair, stared, he also, into the fire. “It’s a bitter mockery, Christine!” “No,” she answered. “It’s the real thing--for just once--the real thing.” They sat in silence for long moments where the clock ticked loudly. She stretched her hand out to him. “Harry! Hold my hand in yours--like you used to do--in the old days before you married me. It will help so much. Can you remember it?--the old touch that used to thrill?” He obeyed without a word, took her little palm between his two large hands, pressed it close. Its death-like coldness struck him and, in defiance of it, he emphasized his contact. With a sudden tenderness that was awkwardly unpractised, he endeavoured to instil a little of his own warmth into it. As he did so, he felt as it were a sluice-gate open in him. A long-repressed sentimentality asserted itself, invaded his lonely soul like a flood. He looked at her. If only--his protective secondary personality, dominant for so many years, reacted jealously, perverted his regret--if only she could have understood him a little more! It was she who spoke. “I’m so proud of you, Harry--so proud of your success!” He almost started--remembering how he had hoped that she would read his name in the newspapers, in a vindictive desire that she should regret what she had thrown away. He saw, suddenly, that it was only her opinion that had ever really mattered to him. “My dear,” he said, feeling himself a tolerant old man who could afford to be kind from his altitude, “perhaps if I had never known you, I should never have worked so hard.” She smiled at him as though there were no irony in his words, but only a beautiful truth. “Harry--Harry darling!” she murmured. “I have helped--helped a little, haven’t I? My love has been what you said it would be--the vital force on which you could always draw? Do you remember that, the night we were engaged?” This cool assumption of a dream, utterly opposed to the facts, startled him. He looked at her, and had not the heart to contradict. Suppose it had been so? Could he surrender himself to this make-believe which she was playing with an almost childish simplicity? It was suddenly very tempting to him. “I remember, my dear--and I promised,” his voice broke a little while he hesitated on a self-reproach, “never--never to cut myself off from it--never to say the harsh word which you warned me would freeze your sensitive little soul.”