"I should hope you'd see it for yourself. It was obvious." "What was obvious?" "The unsuitability of the entire arrangement. Was it likely you'd stick to it when you saw what you were in for?" "You think I tired of him?" "I think you saw possibilities of fatigue; and, like a wise child, you chucked it. It's as well you did it before instead of after. I say, how did Lucy take it?" She did not answer. His smile flickered and died under the oppression of her silence. "Have you done with him altogether? He didn't suggest--er--any compromise?" "He did not." "He wouldn't. Compromise is foreign to his nature." He sat leaning forward, contemplating, with apparent satisfaction, his own strong-grained, immaculate hands. From time to time he tapped the floor with a nervous movement of his foot. "Then," he said presently, "if that's so, there's no reason, is there, why you shouldn't come back to me?" "I can't come back to you. I told you so yesterday." "Since yesterday the situation has altered considerably; or rather, it remains precisely where it was before." "No, Wilfrid; things can never be as they were before." "Why not?--if I choose to ignore this episode, this little aberration on your part. You must be equally anxious to forget it. In which case we may consider our relations uninterrupted." "Do you think I gave Robert Lucy up to go back to you?" "My dear Kitty, if I'm willing to take you back after you gave _me_ up for him, I think my attitude almost constitutes a claim." "A claim?" "Well, let's say it entitles me to a hearing. You don't seem to realise, in the least, my extreme forbearance. I never reproached you. I never interfered between you and Lucy. You can't say I didn't play the game." "I'm not saying it. I know you didn't betray me." "Betray you? My dear child, I helped you. I never dreamed of standing in your way as long as there was a chance of your marrying. Now that there is none----" "That has nothing to do with it. I told you that I wouldn't go back to you in any case." "Come, I don't propose to throw you over for any other woman. Surely it would be more decent to come back to me than to go off with some other man, heaven knows whom, which is what you must do--eventually?" "It's what I won't do. I'm not going back to _that_. Don't you see that's why I won't go back to you?" Her apathy had become exhaustion. The flat, powerless voice, dying of its own utterance, gave him a sense of things past and done with, sunk into the ultimate oblivion. No voice of her energy and defiance could have touched him so. Her indifference troubled him like passion; in its completeness, its finality, it stirred him to decision, to acceptance of its terms. She was ready to fall from his grasp by her own dead weight. There was only one way in which he could hold her. "Kitty," he said, "is that really why you won't come back?" "Yes; that's why. Anything--anything but that."