"But why couldn't you come back to Green Gardens--why couldn't you make them see, Stephen?" "Why, what was there to see? When they sent me down from Oxford for that dirty little affair, I was only nineteen--and they told me I had disgraced my name and Green Gardens and my country--and I went mad with pride and shame, and swore I'd drag their precious name through the dirt of every country in the world. And I did--and I did." His head was buried in his arms, but Daphne heard. It seemed strange indeed to her that she felt no shrinking and no terror; only great pity for what he had lost, great grief for what he might have had. For a minute she forgot that she was Daphne, the heedless and gay-hearted, and that he was a broken and an evil man. For a minute he was a little lad, and she was his lost mother. "Don't mind, Stephen," she whispered to him, "don't mind. Now you have come home--now it is all done with, that ugliness. Please, please don't mind." "No, no," said the stricken voice, "you don't know, you don't know, thank God. But I swear I've paid--I swear, I swear I have. When the others used to take their dirty drugs to make them forget, they would dream of strange paradises, unknown heavens--but through the haze and mist that they brought, I would remember--I would remember. The filth and the squalor and vileness would fade and dissolve--and I would see the sun-dial, with the yellow roses on it, warm in the sun, and smell the clove pinks in the kitchen border, and touch the cresses by the brook, cool and green and wet. All the sullen drums and whining flutes would sink to silence, and I would hear the little yellow-headed cousin of the vicar's singing in the twilight, singing, 'There is a lady, sweet and kind' and 'Weep you no more, sad fountains' and 'Hark, hark, the lark.' And the small painted yellow faces and the little wicked hands and perfumed fans would vanish and I would see again the gay beauty of the lady who hung above the mantel in the long drawing-room, the lady who laughed across the centuries in her white muslin frock, with eyes that matched the blue ribbon in her wind-blown curls--the lady who was as young and lovely as England, for all the years! Oh, I would remember, I would remember! It was twilight, and I was hurrying home through the dusk after tennis at the rectory; there was a bell ringing quietly somewhere and a moth flying by brushed against my face with velvet--and I could smell the hawthorn hedge glimmering white, and see the first star swinging low above the trees, and lower still, and brighter still, the lights of home.--And then before my very eyes, they would fade, they would fade, dimmer and dimmer--they would flicker and go out, and I would be back again, with tawdriness and shame and vileness fast about me--and I would pay." "But now you have paid enough," Daphne told him. "Oh, surely, surely--you have paid enough. Now you have come home--now you can forget." "No," said Stephen Fane. "Now I must go."