She had touched, however, the treasure of his own case--his terrible own case that began to live again at once by the force of her talking of hers, and which could always all cluster about his great asseveration. “No, no, never, never; I had never seen her then and didn’t dream of her; so that when you yourself began to be harsh and sharp with me, and to seem to want to quarrel, I could have but one idea--which was an appearance you didn’t in the least, as I saw it then, account for or disprove.” “An appearance--?” Kate desired, as with high astonishment, to know which one. “How _shouldn’t_ I have supposed you really to care for Bill Frankle?--as thoroughly believing the motive of your claim for my money to be its help to your marrying him, since you couldn’t marry me. I was only surprised when, time passing, I made out that that hadn’t happened; and perhaps,” he added the next instant with something of a conscious lapse from the finer style, “hadn’t been in question.” She had listened to this only staring, and she was silent after he had said it, so silent for some instants that while he considered her something seemed to fail him, much as if he had thrown out his foot for a step and not found the place to rest it. He jerked round to the window again, and then she answered, but without passion unless it was that of her weariness for something stupid and forgiven in him, “Oh, the blind, the pitiful folly!”--to which, as it might perfectly have applied to her own behaviour, he returned nothing. She had moreover at once gone on. “Have it then that there wasn’t much to do--between your finding that you loathed me for another woman or discovering only, when it came to the point, that you loathed me quite enough for myself.” Which, as she put it in that immensely effective fashion, he recognised that he must just unprotestingly and not so very awkwardly--not so _very!_--take from her; since, whatever he had thus come to her for, it wasn’t to perjure himself with any pretence that, “another woman” or no other woman, he hadn’t, for years and years, abhorred her. Now he was taking tea with her--or rather, literally, seemed not to be; but this made no difference, and he let her express it as she would while he distinguished a man he knew, Charley Coote, outside on the Parade, under favour of the empty hour and one of the flaring lamps, making up to a young woman with whom (it stuck out grotesquely in his manner) he had never before conversed. Dodd’s own position was that of acquiescing in this recall of what had so bitterly been--but he hadn’t come back to her, of himself, to stir up, to recall or to recriminate, and for _her_ it could but be the very lesson of her whole present act that if she touched anything she touched everything. Soon enough she _was_ indeed, and all overwhelmingly, touching everything--with a hand of which the boldness grew.