"My feelings!" he broke in. "You know it's not a question of that at all, but of your happiness. But if my feelings must be dragged in--if you will have it so--why, use your own sense for a moment! Look at yourself and then look at me! How can any future together be possible? Think of how I have treated you, and how you have requited me! You see the hopelessness of it all.... Child, you made your first mistake yesterday. You should have let me die quietly. It didn't hurt a bit, and I was not loath. I was slipping away so easily, it seemed far less trouble to go on than to come back. Nothing but your voice could have compelled me. And, if you had let me go, what a future for you! A few weeks bother, perhaps--and perhaps even a little regret. Then freedom. You would have been set at liberty, as you once told me you longed to be! And _clean_, Virginia, as you also wished! You would have been rich, you might have sent for Pansy, for Tony, for mother! Nothing of mine would have remained but the name you bear, and that you would have changed so soon! And you would have thought kindly of me in the end, because the last thing I did was to bring your lover back to you." She drew herself up and gazed upon him with scarlet face and eyes brimming with indignant tears. "_My lover!_ What have I done that you should speak so to me? You know very well that I have no lover," she said. He could see that she was deeply wounded. "I don't understand you a bit," she cried, pushing all her work to the ground, and leaning her forehead on her hands. "When I came back, you seemed so glad--really glad. I hoped ... we might be friends. But what could I do? You didn't like me even to take your hand. If you would really rather have died, of course I am sorry I interfered. I didn't stop to think. It seemed too important, there was only time to act.... I just felt that I--I couldn't let you die like that!" her voice sank away till the concluding words were half inaudible. "But why not?" he urged, "why could you not? That is the whole point, don't you see?" She raised her tearful eyes and looked at him as though he were a riddle she could not read. Then, without speaking, she rose, went to her little work-table, opened it and took out a package. She laid it upon his knee, returning to her own seat. "That was why," she said. His colour rose. "You found that?" "Dr. Dymock tore open your shirt to make sure whether there was any perceptible movement of the heart. He pulled this out of the--the inner pocket in your shirt, and flung it on the grass. I snatched it up, so that nobody should pry into your private affairs; and then, of course, I could not help seeing that they are--my letters." She added, as he held the package doubtfully, and said no word: "You see I cannot make things fit together in my mind. If you wanted to be rid of me, why should you keep my letters--_there_?"