Dane sat where she had desired him, but leaning down towards her, listening and looking very gravely and intently. 'Yes,' he answered; 'and you studied it.' 'I tried.'—The words came rather faintly. 'And that was there the tangle began.' 'What made the tangle?' 'Because—because the lesson and you were all wrapped up together. And I could never study it without—studying you. And so—so it came,'—she drew her breath a little, holding her fingers tight,—'that before I _could_ know much about that—I had to decide something else—definitely—first.' Certainly some things are hard to tell! 'Well, you _did_ decide something else definitely,' said Dane, with most delightful matter-of-fact gravity of manner, not seeming to recognize her difficulty at all. 'Then the tangle grew worse,' said Hazel. 'I used to think I was trying to be interested, or trying to understand, or trying to do, just to please you,—or because you would like me better. And besides—' 'Well—it would not have been very wicked if that had been partly true.' 'No,' said Hazel,—'but then the work would not have been real; and I never could tell. And besides,' she went on again, 'you did not come, and I did not hear,—and it did not suit me to be always thinking about you—and I tried to put the whole thing out of my head.' 'Did I make a mistake then?' said Rollo. 'But I found I could not bear very well to meet you on the neutral ground of that year. I was waiting.' 'Yes. I was not speaking of that,' she said. 'When you take such a tangle into society, it ties itself into twenty new knots. That is all that need be said of the summer and spring. Then I came home.' 'And _then_ I made a mistake,' said Rollo. 'You need not tell me that.' She sighed a little, answering to another point. 'You could not know that you had started all the old questions again, and that I thought it was maybe your changed point of view—that made it so easy for you to give me up.' 'But why do you recal all this now, Hazel?' asked Dane, very quietly. 'I never gave you up; it was a fancied somebody that was not you.' 'It came in the course of my story. I could not pass it. Only for that,' she said, turning her face towards him for a moment. 'Because then, in some of those days, I thought—perhaps—I had learned the lesson you set me.' 'And you do not think so now?' 'I am not sure that it was true work,' she answered slowly. 'For in a storm one flies to shelter,—and just then my hands sought anything that could stand and would not change. But now—' Dane was proverbially scarce a patient man after a certain line was passed. He left his chair now, stooped and took Hazel's hands and gently pulled her up from her low cushion; and then took her in his arms and held her close.