“Ah but I don’t--please believe me when I assure you I DON’T!” she broke out. It burst from her, flaring up, in a queer quaver that ended in something queerer still--in her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears. Her buried face could only after a moment give way to the flood, and she sobbed in a passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant uncaged; her old friend meantime keeping his place in the silence broken by her sound and distantly--across the room--closing his eyes to his helplessness and her shame. Thus they sat together while their trouble both conjoined and divided them. She recovered herself, however, with an effort worthy of her fall and was on her feet again as she stammeringly spoke and angrily brushed at her eyes. “What difference in the world does it make--what difference ever?” Then clearly, even with the words, her checked tears suffered her to see how it made the difference that he too had been crying; so that “I don’t know why you mind!” she thereupon wailed with extravagance. “You don’t know what I would have done for him. You don’t know, you don’t know!” he repeated--while she looked as if she naturally couldn’t--as with a renewal of his dream of beneficence and of the soreness of his personal wound. “Well, but HE does you justice--he knows. So it shows, so it shows--!” But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again broken down and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit there. “Ah Nanda, Nanda!” he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach. “It’s I--it’s I, therefore,” she said as if she must then so look at it with him; “it’s I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you COULD have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can do it still.” He stared at her with his barren sorrow. “A person different from him?” “A person different from ME!” “And what interest have I in any such person?” “But your interest in me--you see well enough where THAT lands us.” Mr. Longdon now got to his feet and somewhat stiffly remained; after which, for all answer, “You say you WILL come then?” he asked. Then as--seemingly with her last thought--she kept silent: “You understand clearly, I take it, that this time it’s never again to leave me--or to BE left.” “I understand,” she presently replied. “Never again. That,” she continued, “is why I asked you for these days.” “Well then, since you’ve taken them--”