So it told him how she had loved him--but with the tremendous effect at once of its only glaring out at him from the whole thing that it was verily she, a thousand times over, who, in the exposure of his youth and his vanity, had, on the bench of desolation, the scene of yesterday’s own renewal, left for him no forward steps to take. It hung there for him tragically vivid again, the hour she had first found him sequestered and accessible after making his acquaintance at his shop. And from this, by a succession of links that fairly clicked to his ear as with their perfect fitting, the fate and the pain and the payment of others stood together in a great grim order. Everything there then was _his_--to make him ask what had been Nan’s, poor Nan’s of the constant question of whether he need have collapsed. She was before him, she was between them, his little dead dissatisfied wife; across all whose final woe and whose lowly grave he was to reach out, it appeared, to take gifts. He saw them too, the gifts; saw them--she bristled with them--in his actual companion’s brave and sincere and authoritative figure, her strangest of demonstrations. But the other appearance was intenser, as if their ghost had waved wild arms; so that half a minute hadn’t passed before the one poor thing that remained of Nan, and that yet thus became a quite mighty and momentous poor thing, was sitting on his lips as for its sole opportunity. “Can you give me your word of honour that I mightn’t, under decent advice, have defied you?” It made her turn very white; but now that she had said what she _had_ said she could still hold up her head. “Certainly you might have defied me, Herbert Dodd.” “They would have told me you had no legal case?” Well, if she was pale she was bold. “You talk of decent advice--!” She broke off, there was too much to say, and all needless. What she said instead was: “They would have told you I had nothing.” “I didn’t so much as ask,” her sad visitor remarked. “Of course you didn’t so much as ask.” “I couldn’t be so outrageously vulgar,” he went on. “_I_ could, by God’s help!” said Kate Cookham.