Taking no note of the fact that for the first time in my life I had called her Regina, she answered, simply: “I tell you I don’t know. If I do know it was because I was so lonely—and I’m over twenty-six—and feel older still—and nobody seemed to care about me but him—and I couldn’t bear the idea of going on and never marrying any one at all—which is what Elsie Coningsby said would happen to me—and what I’d been half wishing for myself—and yet half afraid of.... And you—” “Yes? What about me?” “There was a nurse at Taplow, that Miss Farley—” “Miss Farley! Oh, good God!” “Well, how did I know? She was very pretty.” “Could I see whether she was pretty or not?” “And you were always joking with her and thanking her.” “Of course I thanked her. What else could I do?” “You needn’t have kissed her hand. I caught you doing that one day when I was tidying up in your room.” “Did you? Very likely. When a man is as helpless as I was his gratitude often becomes maudlin.” “I don’t know that you need call it that. He simply falls in love with the pretty nurse who takes care of him. It was happening all the time in the hospitals. But for me—right there in your room—and shut out from everything—” “But that wasn’t my fault. If I’d known you were there—” “It was your fault at Atlantic City—and afterward—when I’d let you see—far more than a girl should ever let any man see.” “But you know how impossible it was for me then—till I’d told you who I was.” “I know it now. I didn’t know it before half an hour ago. And the time when you told me that—that thing—at Rosyth—I had no idea whether or not you meant.... And when you blame me for not coming down-stairs quicker than I did—” “I haven’t blamed you, Regina.” “You can’t imagine what it was to be all at sea not merely as to what you felt, but actually as to what you were—and had been. When you pulled the pearls out of your pocket—and said you were that man—” There were two or three minutes during which she stood with face averted, and I had to give her time to regain her self-control. “You see,” she went on, her rich mezzo just noticeably tremulous—“you see, I’d always thought about him—a girl naturally would, finding him in her room like that—but I’d thought of him as.... And I’d been thinking of you, too. I’d been thinking of you as the very opposite of him. He was so terrible—so gaunt—so stricken—I see just a little of him in you now, after all you’ve suffered.... But you—I don’t know what it was you had about you—your brother had it, too—I saw it again when I met him at Evelyn’s in Montreal, something a little more than distinguished, something faithful and good.” “Those things are often hang-overs of inheritance that have no counterpart in the nature.”