“Your going away killed me, Harry. I was near dead before you went. Your going away killed me.” “Forgive me, I say.” “Never! if you use that word. Forgiveness, sin ... they are words, Harry, that cover up. You killed me; you did not sin. You struggled for life and killed me. That is all. I struggled for life, after your struggle had killed me. Can you imagine how I needed, alone here in the house with Edith whom you have never seen, to struggle against the death in which your going buried me?” “Edith----!” “She is asleep. Have you thought, Harry?” He stood up. “What can I do or say? Yes I have thought. It is that agony I brought to you which I call my sin: it is my heartache for it, my rushing back to you with hands imploring, that cries ‘Forgiveness.’ You stop me.” “Harry you did not sin, because you needed life. Always that comes first; our need of life. I did not give you life. I don’t know why, but I did not give you life. You went elsewhere, fumbled. Now I feel strong. I feel now, Love, that I can give you life. We can now, from our new strength, at last give life to each other. If I did not know this, I would never have seen you again. “But Harry ... please, please understand! I understand your wandering, your hurting, almost your killing of yourself and of me ... in order to find breath. Understand mine!” “What do you mean, Fanny?” “I am human also. I am not ... I do not want to be that perfect emptiness you call your Christian wife. O my beloved, I am all warm for you, I am all living for you, because I too have struggled and have wandered ... in order to find breath.” “What do you mean?” She stood close to him. “Look at me close, my love.” “What do you mean?” Very slowly, his pale white hands with their blue veins curled up like leaves in autumn, drying, drying: fists. “Do you feel how I love you? Do you feel ... O you must ... how my love now, that was a little stupid girlish thing, has bloomed: how it is full of blood, full of sustaining sweetness? Do you not feel, Harry, how you have come back to a love that will feed you, that will lift you up until the end of years?” “Yes ... I feel that. What do you mean?” “That love is over the despair and death of our past years as a tree is over the ground.” “Fanny ... I....” “ ...rooted in it. I was under the ground. That shows I loved you. Always, always. If I had not loved you, I should not have been so deep-buried under the ground. I was dead. That shows I loved you. I am all open in the air, high to you. That shows I love you. Love for you has never stopped, it has grown.” “What do you mean ...?” “There was a thing that helped me to push up from my despair, from my death under the ground where you had buried me, Harry. There was a man....” Harry Luve stepped forward and viced her wrists: “A man--!” “Harry dearest, you must let _me_ now, _me_ now tell you all about it.”